


Deathstyle

by XIX



Category: Original Work
Genre: Anorexia, BDSM, Boys in Skirts, Bulimia, Drug Addiction, Drugs, Eating Disorders, Gay, Gay Male Character, Gay Sex, Gothic, Goths, Homosexual, M/M, Masochist, Rock Stars, Violence, Yaoi, boylove, boys in makeup, dubcon, rock music, rock musician, sadist
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-06-01
Updated: 2014-07-17
Packaged: 2018-02-03 01:25:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 13
Words: 77,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1726103
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/XIX/pseuds/XIX
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Don't expect plot, or resolution, or redeeming social values. It's just film of Deathstyle being Deathstyle. So, yeah. Porn. You're welcome.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

GLITTER

He set the tape player in the sink. It was already blasting tinny Bauhaus. 

"Funeral...of sores..." Kevin sang along to himself, under his breath. His face was inches from the mirror. He studied his eyeliner, frowned, licked the tip of his pinky and rubbed off a microscopic smudge. There was still coke under his nail, chemical and numb on the tip of his tongue. He tugged at his stockings with one hand, leaned closer to the mirror, still humming softly.

There. Perfect. Dressed and painted and once he was dosed he'd be ready to go. He pulled the little box (tin, with a plastic latch, with a sticker that said GOD SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS holding it together) out of his overnight bag (black paisley with a smiley-face keyring hanging from the zipper) and let his hands perform a ritual that they knew by rote. The spoon was from his mom's set--antique, and therefore satisfying to use in this depraved way. The lighter was from a truck stop, and it had a psychedelic yin-yang on it. 

The heroin wasn't bad, actually. He'd gotten it from some kid in Boca Raton, three shows earlier, in exchange for autographs and a videotape of their Halloween show. Normally he didn't shoot up, but it was so much faster, and so much easier to hide, that he'd fallen into doing it once a week or so. Snorting didn't count, he'd cut it and put it in the vial where he usually kept his coke and he could do that in front of the others without making anyone suspicious. 

This was a tiny, baby dose anyway. He couldn't afford to space out while trying to do a show.

Actually putting the needle in was the best part. It was sexual because it had to be. He always thought of how similar these practices were, all the preparation for this brief slick minute of pleasure. He got a the vein on his first try, and the heat was instantaneous when he pushed the plunger in. He had read that shooting up was never as good as your first time. He thought that was bullshit. It was always better than the last one, and after it was over the memory seemed to magnify the pleasure rather than dim it.

He drifted, looking at the syringe, at the geometry of its shape intersecting his arm. 

Someone banged on the door just as he was pulling the needle out. "Just a minute," he yelled, dazed and clumsy and trying to shove everything into his bag. He jabbed the shit out of his finger trying to cap the syringe. Blood. He put his finger in his mouth, sucked hard on the mark, and stood thinking.

After a minute he frowned, groped in his make-up case for his lipstick, and touched up the left corner of his mouth. More banging, hard enough to shake the door. "Fuck off," he called, stuffing the tape player into his bag and trying to pull it closed enough to zip it. 

"This is the last time I tell you. Two minutes," Brian shouted back at him. 

"Dickhead," Kevin mouthed to his reflection. He looked great. Such a pretty job on his lipstick. He grinned at himself, picked up his bag, staggering a little, and managed to heave it over his shoulder. He still had to stash it in the dressing room. He shoved open the door with his foot. It rebounded, and he heard Max swearing behind it. "Move," he said, and pushed it again. It didn't swing back this time, and he pushed his way out into the narrow hallway.

Max was already dressed, thrown-together clothes of mostly black polyester. He had his bass guitar over his shoulder. "He's pissed at you again," he warned Kevin.

"Yeah, whatever," he said, edging past and throwing his bag into the dressing room down the hall. "Is my guitar out there?" 

"Yeah, you're set up."

Kevin did a double-take at Max's clothes. The shirt underneath the suit jacket was fuchsia. With sequins. And he had on blue Converse sneakers. _Light_ blue. Really, honestly, a kind of _baby_ blue. "Has he seen that?"

Max nodded and grinned. "He called me a fuckup and asked me what was taking you so long."

Kevin flushed. The crook of his left arm was still tingly with what had taken him so long. "Let's do this," he said, and walked past Max towards the stage.

PIT

It was the concert and Damien had been waiting for almost seven weeks. His ticket was battered from his fingertips tracing the letters, and all four corners were gone due to his weird habit of nibbling at them.  
He had been disappointed when he'd heard it was a club show, but this was a _big_ fucking club. It was dark and crowded and shaken with hurricane fury and drugs and kids. Everywhere was either pitch-black or blinding with dizzy lights and clove cigarette marijuana dry-ice smoke. There were catwalk-metal balconies here and there. Zippo lighters were gleaming in random places, like futuristic votive candles. 

The stage was set up at the far end of the vast dance floor. It was draped with red velvet, with part of a cow's ribcage spinning lazily from a hook, still heavy with meat. The backdrop was two male symbols linked in arterial red on a black curtain shot through with crimson glitter. There was already one Doc Marten on the stage, next to the keyboard stand. Its owner would be down front, one foot covered with sock or fishnet, hopping and cheering and wild-eyed.

He looked longingly at the inferno of raging freaks smashing the shit out of each other in their frenzy to get closer to the stage. _You'll get annihilated,_ he thought, his left irreplaceable chording hand curling in premonition.

Well, that was probably true. Damien was only five-four, and built like a stick. But there were girls in there, for chrissakes, and they weren't worried about getting annihilated. 

Deathstyle's lead singer was named Brian LeClaire and he had black black hair with an emerald-green streak gashing straight back from the part, and he would be on that stage any minute now, and he was Damien's ideal, pornostar and Satan all rolled into one long tall furious man. 

Damien had spent hours getting ready. This might be The Night, and he had to look perfect. His hair was half black, half blue, and he had it in pigtails with pink ribbons. Full makeup, black and blue, his favorite Deathstyle shirt and a long black velvet skirt that had been incredibly expensive, with fishnets and his combat boots.

He looked, trying to get a feel for what his chances were. He was bracing himself to shove his way in when the lights went out. Not down, just completely OUT. There was a low grinding hum, and all the freaks were screaming in joy. There was no guitar yet, no percussion, only a dark heavy synthesizer hum. Brian LeClaire's voice drowned it all out...a whisper, amplified to an inhuman volume. " _I want world peace, but not too soon...._ "

LeClaire. Damien's erection was like some kind of Copperfield trick, instantaneous and from out of nowhere. This called for desperate measures. 

He drew in a deep breath, checked his shoelaces, and worked his way through the fringe into the center of the pit.

 

" _I want sex toys designed by Tim Burton and H.R. Giger...._ " LeClaire sang, putting a nasty alley-cat twist on _Giger_ that made several people scream in appreciation. The percussion had started, now, deliberately off-rhythm, harsh and acidic.

Damien kept thinking of a painting his roommate had. He thought the artist's name was Anonymous Box, or something. It was of all these people in hell. He figured the guy who'd done that painting had at least a vague understated idea of what this pit was like. It was leather-and-technicolor chaos, hands dripping gloves and bracelets and pewter rings grabbing and pushing and gesturing with occult sigils. There was guitar now, distorted and enraged, falling in discordant opposition to the sound of the drums. His left hand twitched again, aching for taut bright strings and the smooth heavy neck of his Ibanez. And up above all of them, looming over the smash of people was Brian LeClaire. He was in vampire whore makeup with the emerald streak in his hair gleaming under the stage lights. "I want to own the space inside my head..." he groaned into the microphone, raking a hand through his dangerous hair.

Damien stared. It was like an optical illusion.

Then he was too close, blocked from viewing the stage by hundreds of heads with elaborate hairstyles.

Damien couldn't really see individual people. It was just a mishmash of black leather, multicolored hair, lipstick, piercings. It was as much as struggle to stay on his feet as to move forward. He was shoving people all over the place. One girl with a safety pin through her nose and fuchsia hair tried to punch him. He grabbed her head and pushed her. She fell, and Damien saw a flash of her getting kicked in the face.

" _I want drugs that will erase all synchronicity..._ "

Damien thought of Brian with marijuana smoke trailing out of his nostrils, from a bootleg of their second video he had. He squirmshoved his way forward and prayed nobody felt his hard-on and wanted to fight him over it.

He had enough of a gap to _really_ shove forward, suddenly. Something hit him in the chest so hard it knocked his breath out. Damien grabbed it. He felt somebody pulling him backwards. There were flashing lights all over the place, and between that and the smoke he couldn't see a damn thing. 

" _I want an indestructible liver..._ " 

He turned and struck out at the guy who was pulling him. It was messy, but the guy finally gave up and edged left instead. He realized what had hit him in the chest: the security barricade. 

" _I want x-ray vision and precognition..._ "

He was maybe three feet from Brian LeClaire.

He hung on as if his life depended on it, sucked in what felt like a lungful of broken glass, and looked up.

Straight into Brian's terrible, beautiful face.

" _I want a bloody end to American culture ..._ "

 _Me too,_ Damien thought, delirious with bliss. _I also want your tongue in my mouth._

He was blind to the rest of planet earth. His eyes were happily full. He couldn't have told anyone his own name. He was suddenly overwhelmingly having such a good time that his entire body tingled.

Some guy crowdsurfed onto the stage and started fucking with the bassist. Brian saw him though, just before the guards got him offstage. He tried to pound him with the mic stand, and when that didn't work he threw a broken bottle at the guard, making obscene tongue gestures at everyone involved. It was pretty funny. The whole band was watching, sort of cringing in this _oh-god-not-me-next_ sort of way.

LeClaire got tired of that. Instead he prowled his way over to the cow ribcage, draped himself around it, ran his hand over it. He leaned his head into it, still singing, tilted it back and forth, nuzzling at it. He rolled his eyes back, as if it felt like heaven. He did more petting, then put his fingers in his mouth and made more faces for the kids in the front row.

Damien had managed to move over to the right, and now Brian was directly in front of them. Damien was close enough to see every scratch on his chest. He shaded his eyes with his hand, pointed terrifyingly close to Damien, and mouthed _that one_ at someone Damien couldn't see. 

And then someone hit him in the back hard enough to stun him, and someone lifted him by shoulder and thigh and threw him onto the stage.

 

_.... i want the norm to be a higher standard...._

It would have been okay, he guessed, if he had just landed on the stage. 

Damien smashed into Brian, and nearly knocked him over. That was, in fact, how they met, a clattering gothic collision. He sort of kept going after he hit him, so he ended up behind him, in front of the drum kit, in a heap like a bird that had been hit by a car. 

He couldn't really sit up. He pushed himself up onto his elbows. His boots were skidding on the smooth stage floor, and he couldn't get his feet under him. He suddenly felt like a guy who just fell in the tiger pit at the zoo, or some jerk in a horror movie who keeps tripping over his shoelace when Freddy is right behind him.

He looked up.

Brian was looking down at him.

He had on the full deadwhore-ghoul makeup, with red around his eyes, and slashing painted eyebrows, and this was the godfather of all death looks. 

Some stupid kind of instinct that apparently ran deeper than lust and hero worship took over. He tried like hell to run.

About a tenth of a second after Damien got up, he fell over some miscellaneous cord that was strung across the stage. He went down hard, on his hands and knees. 

He didn't get another chance to escape.

Brian grabbed him by his shirt--with one hand--and picked him up. His feet weren't even touching the floor. 

Damien said, "Help." He couldn't breathe, so he mouthed it more than said it. 

Brian was wearing black leather pants, and no shirt. His face was inches from Damien's. It was like looking into the eyes of a snake. It paralyzed him.

"Bitch," Brian snarled at him. Damien couldn't hear him, but he saw his lips move. He had gorgeous teeth. Damien wondered exactly how he was going to kill him. 

Brian half-dropped, half-threw him to the floor, and ripped his shirt upwards. Damien felt it rip at the seams. Brian didn't tear it all the way off. He pulled it up, over Damien's head, leaving his chest bare down to the waistband of his skirt, but his arms were still in it, now hopelessly wound.

Damien didn't have enough presence of mind left to even freak out. He just watched this poster demon kneeling over him, watched him lower his head to his stomach. Brian tugged at the waistband of his skirt, pulled it down until his hipbones stopped it. Damien felt his long hair, brushing his ribs. His whole body jerked.

Brian put his mouth on him, just below his belly button. His lips were slick with black lipstick, and hot enough to burn him. Damien thought he was going to bite him. He had this vision of the singer tearing out his insides, of pulling out bright loops of Damien guts with his teeth. He'd seen how merciless he was with inflicting pain on himself...the word "MURDER" was carved into his right arm.

Brian didn't bite. Instead he licked him, up to his belly button and stopped there, teasing at the silver ring he wore. Damien didn't have blood anymore. Somebody had put liquid nitrogen in his veins. His breath hissed out between his teeth as if he'd been punched. 

Brian trailed his tongue in a long, slow line up his chest, pausing at the hollow of his throat. Damien felt the edge of his teeth and cringed, hoping he'd bite, praying he wouldn't. 

He didn't. He licked along the tatters of fishnet Damien had on under his t-shirt, up to the point of his chin, and stopped with his mouth so close Damien could feel his breath on his lips. He stayed that way for years.

Just when he'd gotten the balls to lean upwards to kiss him, Brian drew back, and looked down at him, with absolute scorn. His sick, starving, masochist soul drank it in, loving it.

Brian leaned close to him again.

And spit on him.

Damien shuddered, licking at his lips, watching the singer glaring at him. "Brian," he whispered. Or maybe he said, "God." He wasn't sure which.

He scratched Damien, a hard vicious slash with his pointed nails, from his throat down to his waist. The bright flare of pain undid him. He closed his eyes.

Damien felt Brian pick him up again, felt him throw him back into the pit. 

_.... i want stupidity to equal fatality...._

"Hey, kid?"

The concert was over. That much he knew, because the music had stopped, and the lights were back up. His shirts were back in place. Dimly, he remembered a girl with kind eyes and pink hair helping him arrange them. She'd whispered, _How was it?_ to him, and he'd replied, _Hell,_ with an idiot grin on his face and something astronomical and preteen gleaming in his eyes.

There was a rhythmic noise, louder than the ringing of his ears, patiently cycling somewhere to his left. Somebody was talking to him. He wondered who.

"Kid, you okay?" the voice said, for the fourth or fifth time. Somebody grabbed his arm. He cringed. It was of the security guards. He turned to face the man, expecting the Rushmore cop expression, but it was a gruff-kind buzzcutted blond man, heavyset but short, with a dumb bushy mustache. He looked vaguely concerned. "You okay?" he asked again, even louder.

"Yeah." It was a big fat lie, too.

"You sure?"

"Yeah."

"Because, the reason I'm asking you is he wanted me to give you this, if you want it."

He conjured a pass from his back pocket, dangled it in the air like a hypnotist. 

 

PRIMROSE

How he'd gotten backstage was a complete blank. He only remembered whole crowds of people, and seeing Max out of the corner of his eye, laughing at something a security guard was telling him, and drinking chocolate milk out of one of those tiny cartons like you got in grade school. Fucking surreal.

Damien stood around, looking lost and feeling like an idiot. He was in a dim, narrow hallway...it was lit by red emergency lights, and decorated with extensive and detailed graffiti. People were pushing past him in either direction. 

Finally, there were no more people. Out of boredom, he started opening doors. Empty dressing room. Room full of boxes. Room full of metal folding chairs. He kept walking.

Now there were barely any emergency lights, even, plus the next few doors were locked. The far end of the hallway was really dark, but he headed in that direction, out of stubbornness. 

That was when he noticed that someone had the hallway blocked. It was probably a security guard. He sighed, most of them were real jerks...he'd heard a lot of comments with the word _faggot_ in them over his shoulder. 

The guy was sitting in one of those metal folding chairs. It was set against one wall, and he had his feet propped high up against the opposite wall. He had to be tall as hell to do that. Damien couldn't see him clearly, but he seemed to be smoking a cigarette.

The guy looked up, pushed his long black hair our of his face, and pinned Damien with his eyes. He wasn't smoking.

Brian grinned around the cardboard stick of the lollipop, then reached up and took it out of his mouth. He stared at Damien, not bothering to pretend not to, taking in the whole obscene outfit. "It's you," he said, after a moment, sadistically making sure to use no particular tone of voice, so Damien wouldn't have any clue about his actual mood.

Damien drew in the longest, shakiest breath of his whole life. "Um..."

"Come over here."

Oh god, oh god. What choice did he have? 

He stepped closer. LeClaire wasn't happy with his little baby step, and he took his feet off the wall, and glanced at the floor right in front of him, then looked hard at Damien.

Damien went.

Brian reached for his shirt. Damien cringed, but it wasn't a grab this time, only a not-so-gentle tug. He pulled Damien forward until he was standing between his knees, then hooked his leg behind the boy's. He was stuck. 

Brian was just looking at him, with sort of an amused expression, a faint mocking smile, like he knew a secret. "Did I hurt you, when I pushed you down?"

"Um, no sir." _Jesus Christ! Did you actually just say that, you fucking idiot?_ "I mean, yeah...I mean, yes sir, I..."

He decided shutting up might be a good idea. Not that Brian hadn't already concluded that he was a complete fucking moron.  
Brian solved his speech impediment by shocking him speechless. He took the lollipop he had, and trailed it along the boy's left cheekbone. It was green apple. He could smell it. 

He traced a circle around his eye with it, then leaned towards Damien so suddenly he almost yelled. He was as tall sitting down as Damien was standing up. Jesus.

Brian licked along his cheekbone, following the path he'd traced around Damien's eye. It terrified him all over again, how warm his mouth was. Damien closed his eyes. 

Damien didn't realize right away that Brian had leaned back again, and was watching him standing there with his eyes shut. He slid the candy along Damien's bottom lip. " Didn't your mom ever tell you about taking candy from strangers?"

The candy was still up against his lips. "She mentioned it once, I think," he murmured, licking at it. Sadistic, Brian held it just out of reach of his tongue, then traced it around his mouth again.

It was electricity. Brian still wouldn't kiss him. He only licked away every trace of green apple stickiness he'd left on Damien's face. He was shuddering like he'd been poisoned. He could taste Brian's lipstick.  
Every so often he would put the lollipop back in his own mouth, to get it wet again. He went over Damien's whole face that way, then back to his mouth. "What did she say?"

"Fuck what she said," Damien told him, and bit at his bottom lip before he could stop him.

It was a vicious, heartless kiss, slick with lipstick from both their mouths. Brian made it violent, biting at his lips, driving his tongue so deep in his mouth he would have gagged if he hadn't been so busy biting back when he could, grinding his tongue against Brian's, trying to gash at his mouth with the stud in his tongue. 

He pulled away from Damien, breathing hard. Damien had a little smug ego flash at that, Brian was turned on from kissing him. He was holding Damien's wrists together in one hand...Damien didn't remember him doing that....and he still had that goddamned lollipop in his other hand. His mouth was smeared red. He looked like a Satanist, or a coprophage. 

Damien leaned over and licked at his mouth. Brian pushed him back,  
grinning. "You want to go to a party?"

 

SHELTER

Deathstyle had reserved the Red Dungeon, which was the entire second floor of the club. The Sisters of Mercy were playing at a volume that could only be described as criminal. It was their cover of an old Rolling Stones song, the one about _war_ and _children,_ made mournful and desperate and dark. A vast print of one of Salvador Dali's crucifixions faced the door, lit by black floodlights. Only the privileged freaks had been invited here. They were scattered in artistic little cliques, varied and paralyzing in alien beauty. A massive black man in a shirt that said EVENT SECURITY was keeping everyone else out. 

Brian kept his hand on Damien's shoulder while they walked inside. Damien almost fell down the two steps down. All his attention was devoted to memorizing the intricacies of LeClaire's fingers against his flesh. There were two layers of cloth between them--worn t-shirt cotton and the dress shirt. Damien wished he'd left them off.

It was open bar, rum and coke and goldschlager the expensive kind of clove, the brown ones with the little gold band. The dance floor was bigger here, smooth and clean, but there were only a few people dancing, two girls doing the serpent-goth thing in long funeral dresses, and what was probably a boy, tall and hidden in a red velvet cloak with ratted black hair. He was standing almost still, staring up into the lights, dancing only with short abbreviated gestures. 

"Hang on. I'll be right back," Brian said, and pressed his fingers harder against Damien's shoulder for an instant, then moved away with long steps to corner a man in lipstick and a business suit at the bar.

The guitarist came in behind Damien. He watched this exchange, caught Damien's eye, and smiled. "Business. He's like that," he said. "I'm Kevin. Axes and sanity for the hell that is this band."

Damien forced himself to smile at that. He mumbled his name, performed the pseudoaristocratic handshake that was required. He was a confused mess. His eyes kept going back to Brian. "Is he always like that?"

"You mean, such a dick?" 

That one made him give Kevin a look, until he saw that he was mostly kidding. "So...mood-swingy."

"Usually. Except when he's worse. You want a drink?"

Damien blushed, and mumbled, "I'm not...um, old enough..."

"You want a drink?"

He got it then. Two social mistakes in less than two minutes. He muttered something and followed Kevin to the bar. 

Kevin was only a little taller than he was, with gleaming chin-length blueblack hair, black lace button-up shirt, and expensive boots with buckles from ankle to knee. He was pretty enough to make Damien feel dingy and white-trash in comparison. Kevin saw him looking, and smiled again. Try as he might, Damien didn't see anything venomous or fake in it. It figured. This bastard had the life he spent his nights dreaming of, and he was _nice._ Which left Damien to be bitter and envious and therefore the bad guy.

"Purple Haze, and, um--" Kev looked at Damien, saw the blankness, and said, "Two of those."

The bartender was a blonde in drag. He nodded and conjured two drinks with an embarrassing Tom Cruise flourish. Damien tasted his as if it might have been cyanide. It was like grape Kool-Aid with an alcoholic bite. He liked it, even though it was probably crammed full of sugar and calories. He was about a third of the way finished with it when Kevin gestured for two more. "So you like the band?"

"Yeah. A lot. I've been trying to see you guys live since the _Lustmord_ tape went around."

"Jesus. That's what, a year? Two years?"

Damien nodded. He drew a bigger swallow through the little straw, not wanting Kev to two-for-one him. "Do you always switch to the Ibanez for 'Biofuck'?"

Kev blinked, then grinned. "You play."

Play. Damien supposed that hours and hours of fingerkilling brainwracking practice might be called play in some parts of America. "Kind of. I'm not all that good. I can do most of what you do until you start with the solo work."

"You took lessons, didn't you?" Kev asked, and when Damien admitted it he said, "They never fucking teach that right. There's a trick to it. There's a pattern for whatever key you're in."

"You change keys, though, I know that much. And I can't read music."

"Me either," Kev said. 

Damien decided he liked him.

They prattled about distortion pedals and sustain and improvisation and what kinds of strings they liked, and how it would rule to string together six amps and distort that and feed it through an extremely old Fender stack. 

Kev stopped in the middle of a sentence, grabbed Damien's shoulder, and spun him around. "Look."

An ugly luscious live Joy Division song was playing, and God help him, Brian was on the dance floor. 

He would write in a notebook, sometimes, usually in the margins beside sketches of LeClaire, words like _serpent, eclipse, osiris._ It embarrassed him to do this--he kept thinking of a Grease-era highschool girl in a poodle skirt, writing _Jane Presley_ instead of taking geometry notes. It embarrassed him, but he kept doing it anyway. He wanted the notebook now, so he could write _mantis, Chernobyl, Snow Queen,_ and _disaster._

The floor cleared, people staring, some of them pretending not to watch, all of them enchanted. Brian danced like a damaged thing, half whore, half marionette, arms tense and spastic, spine fluid and elegant. His painted mouth moved, in singleframe flashes, shaping words that were unrelated to the lyrics. His eyes were either closed or rolled back far enough to render him blind. He folded himself into shapes that should have brought him to the floor, and did not fall. He was alone. The eyes on him were jealous. 

Damien watched this strangely intimate ceremony interaction of lights and music and flesh, heartbroken. His heart was jittering the way it did when he took too many diet pills. He glanced at Kevin once, remembering his presence, vaguely afraid he'd been supposed to notice Brian, not stare at him for five minutes. Kevin was looking at Brian too, with something like…it was that Sunday-school word, the one Damien always thought of when he wanted to shoplift something. _Covet._ Yeah. That was how Kev looked. Like he wanted to steal what he was looking at.

Brian kept at it until the song ended. It was a photo shoot, with no cameras, with a nonexistent photographer coaxing _give me angry, give me hurt, give me fractured, give me death, give me sex symbol._ The DJ didn't cut the outro or messily meld it into another song. Maybe he'd been watching too. After the last note, Brian froze, crooked and impossibly posed, for several beats of silence, then unfolded, and seemed to refocus his eyes. He walked off the floor, and did not look to see if he'd had an audience. He could have been alone in the building.

There were a few more beats of stunned silence, then the sudden crisp loud nasal percussion of old Ministry, that one song that was so bad and yet so catchy, wailing about how it's the same in the whole wide world. 

Damien drew in a single breath, exhaled, very slowly. _Art._

"You've got it bad for him," Kevin said, quietly.

Damien sipped at his Purple Haze--his third or fourth--and said, "I guess."

"I don't think he meant to ditch you," Kev offered.

That stung, both the words and the ungodly sympathy they were inked in with. "I don't care. He's busy. It was great of him anyway to let me come up here."

Kevin analyzed this, decrypted it, and said, "Do you want me to talk to him?"

 

Brian flicked ashes onto the floor, ignoring the ashtray at his elbow. "So you've got a fucking problem with this? What are you, some kind of moralist now? And he fucking sends you over here to talk to me?" he replied, almost shouting over the music.

Kevin sighed dramatically, leaning against the sticky bar, disdaining the unoccupied barstool. "Look, he's a kid. You freak him out. I just don't want you to take advantage. That's all." 

"Take advantage," Brian repeated, and rolled his eyes. "He came with me by himself. No gun to his head."

"Yeah, well. So you blow him off now?"

"I'm not blowing him off. I got him backstage and he's at the fucking afterparty. What else do you want me to do?"

"Maybe talk to him?"

Brian pretended not to hear this. He glanced across the dance floor again, at the little newgoth he had been carefully ignoring for the past two hours. A skinny short kid in the required Deathstyle shirt, with fishnets over his hands and over-the-top makeup and the classic slope haircut, half black, half blue or green. It was hard to tell in the riot of lights. Pretty. And the kid was trying very hard not to look towards the conversation he had instigated. "What is he, like fourteen?"

"Seventeen."

"Jesus."

Kevin sighed. "Come on. Want me to let him down easy?"

Brian shrugged, blew smoke out between his teeth. He kept watching the kid, taking his time. "Tell him he wants to talk to me, fucking come over here himself." He turned away, back to his drink. Conversation over. 

Kevin muttered something like _fucker_ and went back to Damien.

Damien took twenty minutes to work up the nerve. 

Brian watched him, amused, as he pretended to wander in the direction of the bar, and just happened to stop right beside him. "Hey," he muttered, staring fixedly at the top of the bar, tracing a scratch with one blue fingernail. "Are you busy, or something?"

"Not really," Brian said, watching this boy. He was uncannily pretty, with a kitten face and green eyes painted with illegal amounts of liquid eyeliner. The lipstick was dark blue, presumably to match his nails. It was a nice variation on the usual red-or-black. Other than that he was pure factory-issue kindergoth, right down to the combat boots. He lit another clove, deliberately blew smoke in the boy's face to test his reaction. 

Damien closed his eyes, seeming to enjoy the smell, but he didn't comment. He seemed to search for something to say, and came up with, "I like your hair."

Brian shrugged. "It's my insurance policy to make sure I'm never tempted to get a real job."

The kid laughed, surprised. "I worked at Burger King for three weeks, once. They fired me because they found out I was fourteen, but they paid me. That's how I got my guitar."

A guitar. Brian studied him with new interest. "Are you any good?"

It was the kid's turn to shrug. "I can play stuff I hear but I can't read music."

"Then you're better than my guitarist," he said, sending a disgusted look in Kevin's direction. "He can't play anything, period. "

Damien grinned. "Then how come he's your guitarist?"

"He was the only guy I knew that had a guitar." Brian managed to tap the cherry off his clove, swore, and picked it up off the counter with the tip of the cigarette, took three quick puffs. "You smoke?"

"Kind of. Mostly, um, not cigarettes." 

Marijuana. He wondered if the kid was saying that to impress him, or what. A mental flash of two years of drug orgy, condensed and run at fast-forward. He shook it off. "Can you smoke it this way?" he asked, making rolling gestures with his clove. Damien nodded, without that hesitant sick look drug virgins had when you caught them lying. 

Brian studied him for another minute, then inclined his head towards the door.

Most of the crowd had left, but the parking lot was still crowded with various unconventional cars, most plastered with stickers. Kevin's Cadillac hearse was parked up front, near the doors. Max was sitting on the hood, talking with a guy in a red leather jacket, looking weirdly amputated without Brian beside him. Brian waved, casually, and Max waved back. There was significant eye contact between them, though, quick but explicit. From Max, one eyebrow raised, so subtly as to be almost unnoticeable-- _You okay?_ And from Brian, _yeah, we're good. Don't worry._

They sat on the curb around beside the club, passing the joint back and forth. The kid hadn't been lying. He could smoke just fine. And he left a syrup-taste on the joint from his mouth that was impossible to ignore. He did cough, but he did so without any of the pathetic struggle to play it off. Brian found himself admiring this almost in spite of himself. Insecure little stoner-freaks would make a big production out of it-- _man, that shit is harsh_ \--and then try to take vast killer drags to re-assert their machismo. 

"So what was your name?" Brian asked. 

"Damien," The kid said, with a completely straight face.

Brian grinned. "Is it really?"

"Fuck my driver's license." His license said _Alan Edward Keyes, JR._

They didn't talk after that, except for monosyllables, until the buzz was coalescing around them. The wet asphalt and overcast sky gleamed, suddenly, and the voices arguing Mentallo and the Fixer closer to the door crystallized. He watched the kid, mostly. All angles and lines except for round eyes and overpainted mouth. There was a streak of blue on his chin. Brian reached over to touch it, stopped himself, and mumbled something about _your lipstick,_ and didn't watch Damien rub it off.

The joint had been a big one, and there was a third of it left. "You okay?" Brian said, finally. 

The kid took one more, nodded. "Yeah. Thanks."

He took another hit himself, extinguished it carefully, put what was left in the clove pack. Neither one of them moved to go back inside. Not yet. That wasn't how it was done. 

Damien leaned back on his elbows, rearranged his skirt. "What was that  
with the guitarist? Backstage, I mean?" 

"We just..." Brian searched for the least dangerous words, and couldn't find any. "We don't really get along socially."

"You get along with the rest of them? The people in there, I mean?"

Brian shrugged. "They stay out of my way." He squinted at a streetlight on the other side of the parking lot, to see the halo. "You want to get out of here?"

TETHYS

 

Brian insisted his way into Kevin's car keys, and took them both at breakneck speed to the beach. The conversation in the car had been mercifully brief. Brian had said, "Do you go to school or anything?"

"Not really. I went for like a year, but I ran out of money."

Brian had been driving too fast, passing other cars as if they were asteroids in an interstellar dogfight. "Yeah. I dropped out with like a year left for the band. College is useless unless you want to go corporate."

After that, speed and White Zombie, which Brian had turned down only briefly to ask directions. It was so weird to be in a car with him. And he drove like a crazy person. Damien had to close his eyes--tight--quite a few times. Brian finally cut the lights and pulled into the parking lot of a weird church that was just beside the beach. 

The beach was strange at night, an alien Jupiter place that was unfamiliar and uninviting. The sand was a cool bluewhite with moonlight and the gleam of distant hotels. The chaos of a blues band was far behind them, from some tourist bar, sounding tinny and synthetic. 

Damien slogged along in his heavy boots towards the water's edge. The loose sand made his feet heavy and clumsy. He stumbled, and Brian reached back for his hand without looking, and their fingers closed together in a sweaty tangle, and his hand was caught, drawing wrist and arm and shoulder and chest forward. He didn't stumble again.

He had a mantra. His mantra was _don't say anything stupid._ He repeated it to himself over and over again 

Damien had been to the beach twice in his life in the daylight. He remembered sunlight making everything into a commercial and women in fuchsia g-string bikinis. He had been maybe eight, and he remembered mostly brainless, laughing people. In the dark, the ocean was a different animal. Now, it lurked in a devious navy-blue arc, a long writhing plain from the horizon down to the faint gleam of breakers. Farther out, the textured graynavy deepened into black, the edge between sea and sky uncertain.

The bottom of his skirt was wet and flapping salt-sticky against his shins, water seeping into his fishnets in an itchy trail down to his squelching boots. The wind was destroying all the effort he'd put into his hair. Brian stopped and pulled Damien forward to stand beside him. He looked up at LeClaire, at his hair snapping long black tongues in the air. 

The pot made his mouth strange and his thoughts disjointed and sorcerous. He wished Brian would look at him then, and he felt oddly startled when his wish didn't make it so. Brian kept staring out into the water, out into the dark, towards Africa or the edge of the world where a sheet of black water guillotined down into a depthless void.

"What is it?" he said.

Brian shook his head, shrugged a little. He released Damien's hand, and the boy left it in the air for too long, fingers flexed, his skin feeling cold and left out and disconnected. Brian knelt down, picked up a jagged chunk of oyster shell, and sidearmed it out into the water with sudden violence. His lips pressed hard together, a black line drawn narrower and taut with unknown gravitation. He stayed crouched, still watching the horizon. "I hate the ocean." 

Damien blinked. "Why?" 

Silence, so long that he had decided Brian wasn't going to answer. Then, "It's just...too much. There could be anything out there. No one can...control it."

He leaned over and hugged a clumsy circle around Brian's neck and shoulders, out of some vague urge to offer comfort. Brian reached up, stroked his wrist briefly, but his eyes did not move from the horizon, and his expression did not change.

 

 _He isn't going to,_ Damien thought. He tried not to be disappointed. This was already the most unbelievably wonderful night of his life. It was madness to want anything more. This was so much more than he deserved.

They were halfway to the boardwalk, the blues band growing louder as the distance between them closed, when Brian tugged him sharply to the right. His heart gave one hard infuriated slam against his voice box. The beach and the wind and the blues took away the sound he made, and Brian didn't hear. His heart settled hectic and indignant somewhere in the vicinity of his windpipe. 

Brian drew him closer by the neck of his shirt, and leaned in and sucked at the boy's mouth. Damien made another sound, pleading and scared and Brian covered his mouth with his hand and moved his kisses to the boy's neck. 

Damien leaned, then sat, then was suddenly on his back with Brian's hands under his skirt and then tugslide his fishnets were around his knees and his skirt was pushed up so far the wet hem was brushing his chin. The sand was cold and strange under his ass. He made a fullbody soundmotion and pushed up, towards, closer, desperate.

Brian looked down at him, leaning up, hair still windsnapping, a dangerous shadow against the sky. He tugged at the elastic leg of Damien's carefully chosen underwear, then slid his hand under, all calluses and scars and ragged fingernails. He leaned in and inflicted another kiss. Damien made a more insistent sound, appetite instead of terror, and snapped his crotch up hard against Brian's hand.

"Is it black?" Brian said against his mouth.

"Black?" he said, dazed.

"Your underwear."

"Bright blue," Damien said, eyes closing, hands clenching hard on either side, fingers clawed into the sand. Brian held his shoulders, pulled him down, sandscraping, pushed his knees apart and up. He fumbled his hand against his belt buckle.

"Not like this," he said.

"No? Like what, then?"

 _Like dreams,_ he thought. "I don't know," he said, and he didn't resist again.

Brian's dick was against his thigh, now, hot and hard, and he tried to want this, tried to make his flesh lucid and devoted the way it was when he was alone with pictures and headphones pouring LeClaire's voice into his ears. Brian's fingers pushed against him, then inside him, too dry, too rough. He took them out, soaked them with spit, and pushed them inside again. The pain was the magic he had needed, and he groaned again and hooked his feet behind Brian's back and said, "Now, go ahead, now."

His eyes were closed. He felt himself pulled closer, friction with sand, the strange tickle of pubic hair against his own, and a kiss that he was grateful for. He was aroused in a new bright way that seemed to center not in his groin, but his fingertips. Brian pushed in with his fingers guiding his sex, the motion like rape, and left lipstick on his browbone. "Like this?"

Damien shuddered hard, his teeth grinding together. _God. I've wanted you, inside me for years. Years._ He gasped in his breath and nodded. "However you want to, I want you to," he said to the pictures on his wall in his room thirty-six miles away, and pulled his bottom lip between his teeth.

He came too soon, splattered his own stomach and Brian's chest, and the guilt was exquisite, worth every ache, worth every bruise. Brian kept driving inside him until he thought the cramps would spasm through his lips into a scream, and finally came deep and hot, far enough in to make Damien cringe, and left a semicircle of teethmarks in his shoulder. The sensation brought him close again. He had never done this before without a condom.

ARRHYTHMIA

There were only three other cars left in the parking lot of the Red Dungeon. The van with the equipment was long gone. Brian pulled up beside the door, squealing the tires of Kevin's hearse. The guitarist was leaning against the wall beside the USE OTHER DOOR sign, smoking and frowning.

Damien fumbled for the door handle and climbed out, aching. His stomach was killing him. It wasn't from the fucking. It was nerves. He felt like he was going to puke.

Brian climbed out, tossed the keys to Kevin. "Hey, you need a ride anywhere?"

Damien shook his head. He'd expected that, but it hurt anyway. "That's my piece of shit over there," he said, gesturing in the wrong direction, without looking.

Brian walked around the car to him, put his arm around the boy's shoulder. "Can I get your number?"

That made tears a very real danger. It hurt so much he thought it might have been better if Brian had sucker-punched him. But Damien nodded, and Brian went over to bug Kev for a pen while he found the chain at his waist like a zombie and followed it to his wallet, looking for something he could write on. Brian brought him a pen, and he put an old movie ticket-stub on the hood of the hearse and scratched his number down in the faint green light from the streetlamp, watching his hands do this as if guided by signals from space. 

Brian pulled him close, kissed his cheek. He pitched his voice for only the boy, and said, "Hey, I think we'll be back this way in like, two weeks on the way to another show. I'll call you then." He kissed Damien again, on the mouth this time, and made the scrap of paper disappear.

Damien's mouth said, "Okay." .

He went to his car, returned a wave from Kevin, got in and sat down, feeling semen gritty with sand in the crack of his ass. Tears scorched up into his eyes like acid rain. He blinked hard, turned the radio on as loud as it would go, and started the engine. It took him three tries to find the headlights.

In Kevin's hearse, Max ran a red light and Brian leaned against the passenger-side door, cutting lines with his old college ID on a dismembered Big Mac box. Some punk band was mangling an Alice Cooper song on the stereo. Kevin sat in the back seat, smoking a joint and frowning out at the city, his left hand making occasional phantom chords to help the punk band along. "Did you fuck him?"

"Yeah." Brian did a line through a piece of plastic straw that was stained pink from Max's fucking Hawaiian Punch. He sniffed again, arranging the drug until he tasted it in the back of his throat, and straightened the second line. "He was scared, but he wasn't bad. Tight. Cute kid."

Kevin pushed up his unnecessary sunglasses, did a hybrid sniff-cough and exhaled through his nostrils. "You going to call him?"

"Maybe," Brian said, and shrugged, streetlights cutting a graph across his face through the bars of an iron fence. 

"So where'd you go?" Kevin asked. He didn't want to know. He had no idea why he was asking.

"The beach. That place down by that big motel."

Max laughed. "How much sand you got on your balls?"

Brian punched him, laughing, and they did a dangerous swerve that made Kevin choke out a garbled profanity about the safety of his car. A police car parked on the shoulder ahead watched this maneuver with little interest, and they sped past him, invulnerable.

Damien got his key into the lock just as his roommate opened the door. "Hey," he muttered, and stumbled past her to the bathroom. He didn't want any of Kate's disapproving looks or condom lectures. Not tonight.

He stripped off his clothes, peeling off boots and shoes and socks and shirts and bracelets. He stopped with his t-shirt in his hands and held it to his face and inhaled and held his breath, once, before he threw it on the floor with the rest of it. 

He touched the dampness on his thighs, licked his fingers, and stood crying while the tub filled with steaming water. The bite on his shoulder was darkening into a nasty black violent mark the shape of a solar eclipse. _I should get someone to take a picture of that,_ he thought. _What the hell did I think I wanted from him anyway?_

He unrolled toilet paper and blew his nose. 

Kate knocked. "You all right?"

"Yes," he said, weighting it with enough drippingsweet irritation to make her leave him alone. After a second or so he heard her walking back to the living room, and he sighed, spared the speech for at least a while.

The water was hot enough to redden the skin of his feet as soon as he stepped in. He sat down by degrees, stretched out, and waited to feel clean again. When waiting didn't help he attacked his skin with soap and fingernails, and when that didn't help he pretended he didn't care.

After almost an hour, he climbed out, shoved the dirty clothes into the corner with his foot, wrapped a towel around his waist. He made it to his room without falling over boxes or shoes in the narrow hallway, and closed the door and dropped the towel and climbed in bed with wet hair without turning on the lights. His fingers found a smoothcrackle stain on his sheet, and he pulled his hand away and made a sound in his throat like he'd been stung. He drew the quilt and some assorted clothing over his head, curled up small and tight against the wall. 

He made himself go through every idiotic if-then fantasy he'd had, held each one up against the reality of this night just to see the glaring merciless contrast. He'd been more or less in love with something he'd built out of pictures and two CDs and interview posturing, and he'd been just close enough to right. He was so mysteriously hurt that he couldn't even figure out why he was angry.

He resisted for almost another hour, then turned over on his back and started to masturbate, with too-rough strokes, eyes counting pictures that were faint variations in shadow on the walls. His favorite was in the corner, LeClaire in a ruined white lace wedding dress with bared teeth, with _LUSTMORD_ written across his chest in violet lipstick. It didn't matter that the poster was an abstract in the dark. He had it memorized.

In the end, though, it was the thought of the bruise on his shoulder that brought him off.


	2. Chapter 2

FERVOR

The fight, really, was all Max's fault. 

They were in Miami in a redneck bar watching bleacheblonde strippers do ridiculous things to metal poles. Brian had on a black t-shirt and his old leather jacket with all the zippers and the Throbbing Gristle patch and the safety pins. Max had on a light blue trenchcoat and a pink terry-cloth shirt, but he looked more like a psychotic seventies reject than a fag, and the rednecks were leaving him alone so far.

They were sitting in a little nook that was too close to the door and not close at all to the stage. Most of the tables around them were empty or were being used to hold jackets and drinks while the occupants crowded together at the foot of the stage. It was a tourist dive, with a fairly large ratio of truck drivers and bikers.

"We should get out of here," he said, the instant they sat down.

"In a while. I want to get a drink," Max had said, flipping a dreadlock woven with turquoise yarn out of his face. 

Brian nodded, and that was his mistake, because forty-five minutes later Max was extremely drunk.

"Max, you're drunk," he said, interrupting Max's too-loud inappropriate story about a round of blowjobbing he and Kevin had done in Orlando at a party. Max was telling this particular tale with a plethora of gestures. "Come on. Quiet down."

It was too late. The looks getting shot at them were increasing in number. Brian stood up, looked _hard_ at Max, said, "We're leaving," and nodded towards the door. 

Max understood, finally, clarity dawning behind his oversized sunglasses. "Oops," he muttered, and wobbled to his feet and followed Brian in a dazed crooked line outside into the parking lot.

 

They had parked Kev's car far away from the door. They were halfway across the parking lot and Brian was almost beginning to hope that nothing was going to happen when a guy stumbled out of the bar behind them. He gave a messy alcoholic yell in their direction.

"Shit," he said, hearing the footsteps speed up to a drunken run. With one hand he palmed his sunglasses off his face and tossed them, and with the other he shoved Max hard to the left, just in time to save him from a full tackle and stepped between his bassist and their attacker.

It was a short, pudgy inbred fuck in a faded blue ball cap and a grimy sleeveless shirt that said CARL'S TOWING. He had highschool football muscle that was melting into flab, and he reeked of sweat and beer. 

Brian squared off his body, gave the man a cold dead look. "The fuck is your problem?"

The man's answer was like an ugly existential game of charades. He made wavering indignant gestures, while yelling a garbled complaint. The only recognizable words were _fag, sick,_ and fuck.

 _The South can be so charming,_ Brian thought, and sneered and stabbed his middle finger in the guy's direction, and rolled his eyes. He took a fake step, pretending that he was going to walk away.

The guy fell for it. He made a sound like a pissed-off sea lion, and tried a sluggish roundhouse. Brian pivoted in and threw out an arrowstraight perfect punch as hard as he could with his right hand, the one that had all the rings. He did this with no wasted motion, with exasperated speed.

It was like hitting a side of bacon wrapped around a cheap ceramic plate. A greasy fracturing sensation traveled up his hand and into his chest. The guy dropped. His hand was covered with snot and beerspit. He shuddered, lips peeling back in disgust, flicked his hand in the air and then wiped it on his jeans.

The entire incident took about fifteen seconds.

Max was standing breathless and shaken and scared, holding both hands up as if he had been frozen in the act of shielding his head. He was a glyph that spelled out the word _cringe._ "What just happened?" 

Brian flexed his hand. A dull annoyed ache. Not bad. He probably wouldn't even need ice. "Nothing, Max. Did you see where my sunglasses went?"

"You threw them," Max said, slowly lowering his hands, staring at the moron squirming on the ground. 

"Max, I _know_ I threw them. I threw them so they wouldn't get broken. They're _Armani._ Never mind," he said, spotting them. He went and picked them up, gingerly. Not broken. He blew off the dust, cleaned them carefully with the tail of his shirt, and put them back on.

"He called us fags, didn't he?"

"Something like that. We _are_ fags, and it doesn't matter," he said, his cliché sinking feeling warning him that extremely soon it was going to matter.

Max was standing with his hands clenched at his sides now, the stare colorized into a glare, doing something like panting through his nose. "Is my bass in the car?"

"Max, why--"

"Because it's heavy as fuck and I'm going to bash his fucking skull in with it!" he screamed, at full serious volume. He drew back his foot and slammed his sneaker into the redneck fast and clumsy, ribs, back, thigh. The guy kind of whimpered with each feeble kick. He made no move to get up, and Brian suspected his jaw was either dislocated or broken. Or both.

Brian let Max have four kicks, none of which connected all that well, before he grabbed him. He tried to drag Max towards the car, but Max was his height, and had a hulking kind of build, outweighed him by at least thirty pounds. He got away twice. The second time Brian sighed, lit a clove, and let Max just kick the guy. He sent one habitual look towards the bar. Loud country music. Nobody was coming out. 

Max was punctuating a lecture, now, kicking on each word for emphasis. "Fucking stupid sack of shit. What do you care if I like to suck dick? Why does that fucking have to give you a problem?"

"That's enough, Max," he said, in a quiet version of the lead-singer Fuhrer voice. Max stopped.

He was grateful. He was also careful not to look relieved. Sometimes Max was a very loose cannon, and he would have been utterly without surprise if he had gone back for another round of yelling and kicking.

"Bitch," Max muttered, and covered his face with his hands and turned his back on Brian and went to the car.

 

They sat. Max stared fixedly out into nothing. Brian smoked, watching him, and turned on the radio with the volume low. He turned it to disco to see if Max would smile. He didn't smile. "Max?"

Max sniffed hard. "I hate that shit."

Brian nodded. He knew Max didn't mean the disco. He reached over and smoothed one hand over Max's nest of dreadlocks. "I know."

Max shook his head.

"You gonna cry?" Brian asked him, quietly.

Max was silent. He sniffed again. "No," he said, dripping sarcasm that was supposed to sound macho. Then he lost it, and covered his face with his hands again, shaking.

"Hey," Brian said, and stroked his hair again. He couldn't think of anything else to say, so he repeated it--hey, hey--in a voice that was as close to gentle as he could fake. He pushed at the window crank with his foot as subtly as he could and threw out the rest of his clove.

"I'm just _sick_ of all that shit," Max burst out. He leaned forward against the steering wheel and wrapped his arms around it, his hair swinging forward to hide his face like surrogate hands. 

Brian couldn't reach his head without sliding over now, and there was a fifty-fifty chance that would make Max go berserk. So he patted Max's shoulder instead. "I know," he said. "That's why we're doing what we're doing now. Vicious--"

"--fag music," Max finished with him, and Brian could hear him smiling. "I'm just sorry I fucked up. I'm just…drunk," he said, and sat up and started the car.

"Only thing you did wrong is those shoes. Fucking nobody wins a fight in sneakers. And, you kick like a girl." 

Max punched him. It was a flimsy punch. Brian pretended to rub his shoulder, and Max abused the transmission until they were out of the parking lot and back on the road.

Back in the hotel room, Max took off the sneakers in question. He sprawled out on the double bed. They could hear Kevin in the room next door, jamming on distorted guitar, with their keyboardist, Casey. It was something the two of them did as a hobby--within the band itself, what Brian said went. Musically and otherwise. They got together when they could and played discordant, alien music that was slow and unmelodic. This left Brian and Max to their own devices once or twice a week. 

They usually got high and watched television. Occasionally they had sex, or performed vandalism for variety. 

"It's fucking hot in here," Max said, and waited for Brian to find and decipher the room's thermostat.

Brian jacked the AC down as low as it would go, pointing the little dial all the way around to the snowflake. The other side, the heater, had a tiny sun symbol. No rocket science here. He locked the door and turned the deadbolt, and stretched out beside Max. "You still upset?"

"Yeah," Max said. He made a long, shuddering, pissed-off sigh. He clicked on the TV with the glued-down remote control, and channel surfed until he stopped on Space Ghost. 

Brian turned over on his side, watched Max watching cartoons for a while. He got bored, considered packing a bowl, then leaned over and kissed Max's chest through his shirt.

"Pest," Max said.

"Oh, a pest, am I?" Brian moved up, settled under Max's chin, leaving wet kissmarks.

"Your hair tickles," Max told him, without sounding terribly determined, brushing strands of it out of his face and sniffling dramatically.

Brian switched direction again, backtracked down to Max's waist. Max ignored him. He stopped there to stroke from Max's thigh to his crotch. "You won't sleep if I don't. You'll lie there bitching about rednecks and doing _my_ coke until four am." He chewed a wet spot in the tail of Max's shirt to pass the time while he undid the snap and zipper and purple boxer shorts. "These are really hideous pants," he said.

Max started to laugh, and ended it in a narrow groan. Brian had worked his dick out of his pants and was stroking it in a teasing, friendly way. Sex between them was an amusement and a convenience, a kind of obscene horseplay that had gone on since they met in college. 

Brian leaned up and licked Max's hand to make him giggle. 

"You are a fucker," Max said, squirming and laughing. "Either suck it or quit so I can watch TV."

"Go ahead. Watch TV," Brian told him. 

He moved back down and took it in his mouth, toying with the head in a deliberately inept way until Max groaned and smacked the back of his head. "Queer."

"Whore," Brian said, muffled, and gave him a long hard lick. He did it twice, just to hear Max stop breathing, and settled into the rough shallow suction Max liked best.

"Queer," Max said again, much more softly. His head rolled back, and he sighed. 

It never took long. Not between them. Brian kept it up after Max had come in his mouth, until Max whined a complaint and pulled away from him. He sat up with his mouth full of sperm and his lips pressed tightly together. He gave Max a wide-eyed psychotic look, and swished the come around in his mouth.

" _Gross,_ " Max said, sounding genuinely horrified.

Brian raised his eyebrows, pointed to his mouth, gestured _kiss?_

Max yelled. Brian went for him. He had him pinned when the phone rang.

They both went for it, with Brian humming angrily. He shoved Max's hands away, picked up, and said with his mouth still full, "Hello?"

"Is that you, Brian? It's Tristan.

He almost choked. He swallowed too fast, and choke-gagged. Semen in your windpipe was no fun at all. "Hey."

He violently gestured at Max and the phone, mouthing _Tristan._

"Oh _shit_ ," Max said, and sat up, trying to get his half-hard penis back inside his clothes.

"Yeah," he said, waving away Max's frantic _Well?_ gestures. "Thanks, yeah. Okay."

He hung up. Max stared at him, in a truly priceless pose of complete frustration.

Brian smiled. "Judecca Tree. With special guest, Deathstyle."  
Max shrieked, and jumped, and grabbed and dragged at Brian, yelling. There was a confused hectic rush to punch each other, shout, pack bowls, pour alcohol. Kevin and Casey came over after the yelling went on for a minute or so. They asked what the hell was going on, and Brian told them.

"We got the tour," he said.

 

STARVATION

Damien's first Deathstyle exposure had been two years earlier. He'd picked up a tape from someone handing them out in a club parking lot, and had put it into his Walkman three days later out of boredom. Halfway into the first song, he was digging through his backpack for the tape case, desperate for liner notes. DEATHSTYLE, _lustmord._ Color photocopied in red on black. It was a demo, and the most of the songs had ended up on _Blood Red Tangent._

The inside had a track listing, broken into three sections: _dead, hard,_ and _spread._ There were photos, of a tall narrow vampire-pretty man with long black hair, a series of three. He was posing on a metal autopsy table, in long black gloves and nothing else, with a Y-incision drawn on his chest in lipstick. Smutporn poses, with knees or gloved hands hiding his sex. Below this there was a stark listing of names. Vocals, Brian LeClaire.

Sobbing, growling, wailing, pleading, threats, gasping, moaning, screaming, honeydark chemical evil: Brian LeClaire.

After two weeks of trying, he scored a third-generation copy of a fairly decent camcorder tape of a live show. He'd watched it like a junkie watches the red swirl in a syringe. 

LeClaire had been wearing a torn black velvet shirt, a black g-string, a red garter belt, shredded fishnets, and knee-high combat boots. He had demon eyes and a pornographic mouth and a razor-straight confident viciousness that left Damien vacant and groping for the remote to rewind it with the hand that wasn't fighting with his zipper. Again. _Again._

He'd been letting a stupid punker-goth named Aaron fuck him occasionally at the time. No kissing, no discussing it. He would call. He would drive to Aaron's. They would smoke a joint without looking at each other, pet each other with practiced disinterest, and then fuck on the couch with all of their clothes still on. _Brian. Fuck me harder._ He'd said it muffled into the sleeve of his jacket so that the Aaron didn't hear. That hadn't been all he'd said, either, but the rest of it had been--well, obscene. The violence he had insisted on that night had landed him in the free clinic for persistent bleeding a week later

At the clinic, he'd told two horrified medical assistants that he'd been raped by the lead singer from some band. No, he didn't self-identify as a homosexual. Yes, he was aware of the risks of unprotected anal sex. No, he couldn't remember the guy's name, or the name of the band. No, he hadn't called the police. Yes, he would like some painkillers. 

He wasn't sure if they believed him, so he invented details. They either bought it, or pretended to so that he would quit for chrissakes talking about it. 

That became part of it, too, the disinfectant smell and the metal table 

_(the table, he would have felt like this, cold and naked and)_

and the prescription and the half-disgusted, half-worried looks they gave him. That, and the condoms they gave him.  
 _  
Do you want an AIDS test?_

_No. Not right now. I can't take that right now._

_Do you want some information on AIDS and the HIV virus?_

_…not really._

__  
He'd used one of the condoms later, on a dildo he had made out of an oversized candle. The video was playing, and the spermicide he didn't need was slick and cold and stung inside him. He'd fucked himself bleeding again, and the drum machine through the speakers told him how fast, how hard.

In the two weeks since the Deathstyle concert, and the luscious casual fuck, Damien's life had been slowly and patiently fraying into a useless tangle. He could not sleep. He could not play. The three guys he had been trying to scrape into a band got frustrated with his drunken ineptitude and ditched him. He was in serious danger of being fired from his job--the everything boy at a tiny record shop. 

Damien ignored this, nodding at his bassist and his boss with the same glassy-eyed apathy that he gave the television and the red lights that caught him. At night, he lay in bed with both Deathstyle CDs ( _Murder Deity and_ Blood Red Tangent) and nothing else in his changer. He curled up naked in his old blanket, drinking, mouthing _drive infection through this cage, love me into liquid rage_ along with LeClaire over and over. The bruise on his shoulder faded, and even his rubbing over it hard with his thumbnail didn't make it stay. He had wanted to get it tattooed over, but he hadn't been able to scrape together enough money for that.

He had an AIDS test. Came up negative. He nodded and smiled at the nurse and shoved the papers in his wallet crooked and careless, and went out and sat in his car and stared at the sand still in the floor and smoked the same kind of cloves as LeClaire did, feeling scoured out and disappointed.

He was lying in his room again, smoking the last of the weed out of a truly shitty pipe when Kate knocked on his door. "Call for you."

"I don't want to--" He reconsidered his drug supply, and said, "Who is it?"

"Some guy, says his name is Brian."

Damien almost knocked her over trying to get past her.

 

He grabbed the phone, strung the cord behind the couch, through the kitchen, and out the back door onto the porch, muttering _don't hang up, don't hang up, don't hang up_ under his breath. He lit a clove, took a deep breath, and said "Hello?"

"Hey."

Only that, dark and casual and amused. Damien felt a literal chill run from his neck to his toes. His turn. "So…what's going on?" He was trying to _smell_ the phone, for some ungodly drug-related reason, and he was damned close to licking it to see if he could taste anything.

"We got this massive gig. You won't believe this. We open for Judecca, thirty-six shows, nationwide."

He gasped, and felt an odd Christmas explosion of joy in his chest. Judecca Tree was _the_ goth-industrial band. This tour could make Deathstyle's career. "That's great!" he said, and meant it.

"Yeah, we're excited. Anyway at this level it looks pretty stupid for us to be setting up all our own shit, not having anybody around taking care of us, so we wondered if you might want a job. You said you could play, so I figured you might know enough to scrape by if we showed you how everything goes."

The bottom dropped out of his reality. Backstage. Makeup and vinyl and wheeling heavy speakers and coiling wires and plugging in guitars. Tall angry guitarists in sweat-smeared makeup drinking beer out of plastic cups. Cops loitering around and exchanging glares with the band. LeClaire. LeClaire, for chrissakes, was asking him to hang with them for a year. He bit his lip hard, and managed to squeak, "A job?"

"Well, yeah. I need to know pretty soon if you're interested, though, because we kick off in three weeks and I'd need you down here in a week."

"Down here?"

Brian made a sound like a cough, and said something away from the phone. "Yeah, we're in Miami."

Damien's mind went into overdrive. His car was a piece of shit Nissan that he'd gotten at a government auction for four hundred dollars, with an almost completely non-functional coolant system. And he had a grand total of forty-seven dollars in his bank account. Miami was a seven hour drive. "Um, I guess, yeah, I'd love…yeah, I'd like to do it. Yeah."

He was babbling. He stopped. He could sell his guitar borrow from Kate donate plasma suck dick downtown for yuppies in Lincolns. He'd find a way.

Brian coughed again. "Well, cool. You might want to get a pen."

Kate was watching him through the window, frowning. He frantically pantomimed pen and paper. She rolled her eyes and brought him a marker and a notebook. He nodded and umm-hmmed at Brian and wrote GREEN HEIGHTS, Room 415, scattered directions, and the number for the front desk.

"This place is kind of a shithole, and we haven't made any money yet, we're all crammed into two rooms. It's only for the two weeks, rehearsal and everything…after that it's buses and it should get a lot worse."

"That's cool, don't worry about it," Damien said. That part, at least, was true. He'd been homeless twice in his life, and lived in abysmal circumstances for most of the rest of it. Being crowded into a cheap hotel with his favorite band was no particular hardship. "Okay, well, I guess I'll--"

"Hey. About that night, the beach and everything."

Damien swallowed, pushed his hair behind his ears. "Yeah?"

"You're not upset about that, are you?"

He was shaking his head until he realized that was useless, and said, "No. I'm…no, why would I be?"

"Yeah. Well, give me a call the day you leave…it's Saturday now…say next Friday?"

"Sure, okay." _A roadie. I'm going to be their roadie._

"Well, we'll see you then," Brian said, and disconnected. 

Damien stood, listened to the silence on the line until the dial tone finally came back. He debated screaming. Then he dialed his work, and told his boss to go fuck himself. 

"Kate, he wants me to work with them. Come on. Please."

"I'll lend you the money, okay? I already said that." Kate scraped her hand through her short iodine-orange hair, and lit another of her awful Camel non-filters. "What I'm saying is he's buying himself a fucktoy, and I'm not sure you realize that."

Kate had rescued him from a rundown two-bedroom apartment, when the seven people living there was threatening to expand to nine. She was thirty-two, freak to the bone, and wonderful, but she got parental on him every so often.

Damien flopped beside her on the couch, stole her lighter, and lit another clove. The TV was quietly muttering the 700 club at them. "I know that," he said quietly. "I thought about that, and I know. I don't care." Actually that was kind of inaccurate. He did care. He cared from his aching eyes down to his aching erection, but he figured she didn't really need these kinds of unpleasant details.

"Damien--"

"Please, not the _And the Band Played On_ lecture, Kate. Please. I really just want to be happy about this. Please."

She sighed, and blew smoke through her nose. "You call me as often as you can."

"I will."

"Promise me."

"I promise," he said, and leaned over and kissed a noisy smack on her cheek to try and make her laugh, but she only gave him a tired smile, and said, "And you'd better let me help you re-dye your hair before you go."

SOMNAMBULISM

"So you asked him?" Max said, sounding almost completely disinterested. He was building a tower of fast-food cartons on the nightstand table, and he had a messy joint rolled in a page of Ezekiel from the convenient Gideon bible hanging out of his mouth.

"Yeah. Freaked, and then said yes," Brian told him, snagged his joint and took a massive drag. "He'll be here by Friday or Saturday."

Kevin was sitting at the foot of the bed, scowling, but when Brian mouthed _shotgun?_ at him, he leaned over and pressed his mouth open against Brian's, and drew in recycled smoke. "This is fucked up, you know," he said with caterpillar puffs shaping his words in the air.

"Knock off that shit, Kev. We went through this. He's an adult. Makes his own choices. Like you," Brian said, and gave him a smile too sweet to be anything but a warning.

Kevin shrugged, and muttered something in a pissed-off tone of voice--but he dropped his eyes. Max took back his joint, and hit it again, obliviously setting a McDonald's cup on top of his artwork, with the finesse of a Renaissance sculptor.

 

KEROUAC

Damien watched the gauge on the gas pump rolling closer to fifteen dollars. His makeup was sweating off, and his Skinny Puppy shirt was sticking to his chest and his back. Two frat boys in Hilfiger regalia were lounging against a decked-out Mustang in front of the pay phones, elbowing each other and gesturing in his direction, snickering. The car had one of those fake-gold chain license plate frames, and a sticker that said TOO FLY. 

TOO FLY, for chrissakes.

He thought of cold night sand under his back and the edge of the stage banging into his ribcage. 

He stopped the gas pump dead at fifteen, and gave the two idiots a cold dead stare. 

He walked into the store, got a scowl from the fat bleacheblonde behind the counter, and gave her a ten and five ones. He watched, sickly fascinated, as she keyed it in with chubby fingers, hitting the keys with the tips of outrageously long fake orange nails. She had on so much mascara that her eyelashes were sticking together in clumped gloppy spikes. He wondered if she knew that was only attractive on men. _Skinny men._ Then he wondered if she knew she looked like the women on sleazy Internet fetish sites, the desperate sites that came up no matter what you typed into the search engine, or unfolded onto the screen in unwanted pop-up windows. Those sites usually had descriptions like XXX FETISH FAT LARGE BIG WOMEN LARGE TRIPLE D PUSSY SLUT, and were great for gagging people out at parties. Especially parties where drugs were involved. 

He snickered, trying to picture her sprawled out on someone's fake tigerskin rug like a beached whale in red leather. Or sitting on the face of some poor misguided corporate fuck, drowning him in rolls of cellulite. She heard him, and he ducked under her glare and out the door before she could say anything.

He went back to his car, and the three tries it took him to start it made the frat motherfuckers nearly kill themselves with laughter. The only thing in the car that did work was the stereo. He'd built it himself, and he suspected the volumes it could reach were illegal. He Alien Sex Fiended them at noise-pollution volume and gave them an elegant variation on the finger, and peeled out. 

He hated fuckers like that. They were the popular jock bastards, drowning their probable fagness with an endless supply of homophobia and backslapping and football jargon. Tough. He thought about how much it hurt to get fucked hard and sudden and merciless, and figured both of them would probably scream like girls if their pseudo-toughness was put to that kind of sticky test. He was tempted to reverse, but one could only get away with so much immaturity in one encounter. He'd save it for a cop or something.

He drifted off again into vinyl feedback daydreams, and had fantasized himself into a physically difficult position against a blaring amplifier when he almost smacked into a Lincoln. Both of them slammed on their brakes, and he cheerfully flipped off this guy, too, swerved around him, and floored it to the on-ramp. 

A green and white sign said: Miami--three hundred and twenty-seven miles. He turned the stereo up louder, lit his last remaining joint after groping around in his pockets, and forced his way into the left-hand lane. If he went eighty…eight went into thirty-two four times which meant in four hours he would be in a hotel room with Brian LeClaire. He couldn't go eighty, though. His car would explode. 

And, it had too many stickers. Somehow, FREEDOM OF RELIGION MEANS ANY RELIGION, GAY AS HELL AND NOT GOING TO FAKE IT ANYMORE, and FOLLOW ME TO SODOM seemed to get the attention of cops pretty goddamned quick. And that wasn't counting the band logos and the big pink triangle, the one that was so big he'd had to fold it up onto the top of the trunk. 

Sixty-five, seventy was more realistic. Six hours. 

He stabbed at the eject, threw _Another Planet_ into the passenger seat, and put in _Murder Deity._ The first track was a nasty furious rant called "Biofuck" that made him drive faster. _You will suck my fucking dick. You will be my heretic._ After that, "Horus," a sad discordant song that he usually skipped past on his CD player because it creeped him out. The tape deck took too long, though, and he let it run.

He had taken a long detailed shower that morning. Kate had watched him shave, silently, watched him paint on eyeliner and change his mind three times before settling on the t-shirt and black jeans with leather shoestring stitched through them at random. She kept saying, "Just be careful. That's all I'm asking. And please call me as soon as you get there."

"It's just to Miami, Kate," he told her. "I'm not even leaving the state."

"Still. I worry. A little queer with a big mouth like you, what if your car breaks down?"

He grinned at that. She got him with variations on that one constantly. "Scott looked at the car. He did a couple of things and said that as long as I don't let it overheat, I'll be fine. Okay?" Damien frowned at his pencil-thin eyebrows, dug in a shoebox for tweezers, made minute corrections an inch from the mirror. 

"You can call collect. I'll find a way to get you home."

He sighed, set down the tweezers and hugged her. "I know."

She'd squirmed away from him, and sniffed, and went into her room and came back with the one thing she owned that he would have done _anything_ to have--her heavy leather jacket from her hardcore punk phase, utterly decked with expensive studs and paint. "It gets colder than you think, around places like Seattle and Detroit and shit," she said, in her abrupt cigarette voice, without looking at him. She tossed him the jacket. It was so fucking heavy that catching it nearly pushed him off balance. "I want it back when you get home," she informed him, and stalked down the hall to the living room, where she settled down to chainsmoke and watch talk shows until he was ready to leave. "And don't take my purple lipstick," she called.

"I won't," he yelled back, and cursed under his breath and took it back out of his makeup bag.

The jacket was on the passenger seat, arranged over the back, studs snarling, anarchy symbol jeering at him from the sleeve. It spread an aura of the Sex Pistols and 1980 and black berets and heavy engineer boots all the way through the car. He smiled. He'd tried it on, back home, and it looked great on him.

He hoped Brian liked it.

He hadn't taken her lipstick, but her silver eyeshadow and her skull choker were in his bag. Damien didn't consider it stealing. He knew perfectly well she'd be in his closet before the end of the week, and besides, he fully intended to give them back whenever he got home. He figured she'd bitch about it the minute he called, and he figured the words _fuckwad_ and _queer_ would be used frequently. He couldn't wait. He missed her friendly abuse already.

"You have an imagination disease," he growled along with LeClaire, and edged up to eighty-two and drew in a deep breath to smell the leather of Kate's jacket. He drove south. 

Four hours into his drive it ceased to be amusing. Damien couldn't remember the last time he'd driven for so long--actually, he was pretty sure he had never driven for this long. His back hurt, his neck hurt, and his right leg hurt from toes to thigh from pushing down on the stubborn gas pedal. The car had a particularity that involved steady pressure refusing to translate into steady speed, and he had to constantly adjust to keep it at seventy-five.

Hunger and pain made him stop about a hundred miles short of Miami. He did as Kate had asked, for once, and stopped at a rest area whose highway sign advertised the dubious safety of SECURITY, and he kept on his sunglasses to hide the eyeliner. Cloves and sweat had removed most of the rest of his makeup. He parked, climbed out and stretched next to a station wagon that had apparently been crammed full of screaming rich kids. The mother, a faded woman with a bad perm and too much jewelry gave him a smile. "You coming south?"

He stared at her, startled at being the recipient of polite conversation. Something from his mother kicked in, and he said, "Yes ma'am. I'm going to Miami."

"We're coming from Fort Lauderdale. You're heading into some rain. Might want to be careful," she said, and patted a wailing crew-cutted boy in a LANDSALE CHRISTIAN ACADEMY shirt that had attached himself to her leg.

"Thanks," he said, blushing for some unknown reason. He felt he was supposed to reciprocate somehow, and he said, "Traffic's not too bad farther north. Watch the trucks, though. Those fuck--those guys think they own the highway."

She nodded, and smiled again, and her husband--stout and Rolexed in a Polo shirt--gave her a disapproving look and telepathically signaled her to load their litter back into the car. 

"Bye," Damien called at her. He was strangely delighted when she waved through the tinted window. He watched them pull out. Some kid in the back was hitting another kid with an Elmo doll. He decided that aside from the obvious benefits, that gayness got points for leading to _no_ small children whatsoever. He didn't ever want to look worn out like she did, or fed up and humorless like her husband did.

He wandered to the concrete building that seemed to make up most of the rest area, found the bathroom, and took a long satisfying leak. Then, he dug out his wallet, and carried it in his hand with the chain swinging against his thigh, and bought a Dr. Pepper with two quarters and two dimes. He drank most of it in one gulp leaning against his bumper, burped at a volume that made an old lady with a cane glare at him. When it was almost gone he set the can down and crowded himself back into his car. All the aches returned, multiplied, and he groaned and squirmed, fastened his seat belt, and tried the ignition.

Rrrrr….then, nothing.

"Fuck," he said, dismally. Not now. Not so close. The guilt was immediate-he shouldn't have stopped. He should have known better.

He lit a clove, smoked it down to the filter, praying in an abstract kind of way, and tried it again.

Nothing.

" _Fuck_ ," he said again, with more insistence. He put it in neutral, and tried and tried and _tried_

and it caught.

"Hallelujah," he said, almost a whimper, and nudged the gas with painstaking care until he was sure it wasn't going to stall. He backed out carefully, and stumbled his way through the tourists back onto the highway.

Thirty miles outside of Miami the car began to rattle. 

"Fuck, don't, I'm almost there, come on, _don't,_ " he said, trying to read his torn-out notebook page of directions and drive at the same time. This caused him to slow down to forty-five or so, and indignant yuppies in rented Cadillacs roared past him. He gritted his teeth, tried to memorize _left on_ and _right at_ and kept driving. 

Damien parked at the Green Heights Hotel across from Room 415. He sat in his car with the engine off. It would probably never start again, it had expanded into a symphony of noise and a rhythmic vibration that got worse and worse. Who knew. Broken. Who cared. He did manage to have the stereo running, and he sat basically having a nervous breakdown, after which he did his hair and his makeup again and dug in his lunchbox until he found a breath mint. 

The door was beige, scratched up, with _415_ on it in those metallic mailbox stickers. He knocked. There appeared to be a red light bulb in the window, and Ministry was blaring inside the room. Damien stood having a panic attack and wondering if he'd packed his diet pills when someone yelled, "Who is it?"

"It's Damien. We met at the Red Dungeon show," he yelled. He eyed the parking lot. There were people walking around and shit, and here he was in ripped pants and red lipstick.

The door opened, the music poured out like smoke, and smoke poured out like music. Kevin nodded at him, stepped back to let him in. There were two double beds crammed very close to the door, and Brian was sitting at the foot of one laughing and hitting an elaborate bong. Max was beside him, wearing Mickey Mouse ears and a stunning green jacket blazing with sequins. 

"The other bed's ours," Kevin said. "And he said God help us if we fall asleep first."

Damien looked. He saw that Kevin was serious, and he must have had a weird expression on his face, because Kevin laughed and pulled him inside.

"Hey. You're actually here on time," Brian said. "I don't think you really met my bassist. Max 69, Damien."

"Hey," Damien said. 

"Yeah, go ahead and ask him about the sixty-nine part," Kevin said, sprawling out on the unoccupied bed. 

"No, don't," Brian said, laughing.

Too late. Max grinned, and announced, "In 1969 cigarettes only cost seventy-five cents a pack. In 1969 acid was primarily available on sugar cubes. In 1969 the foresting industry--"

Brian punched him in the arm. Max stopped.

Damien sat on the edge of the bed next to Kevin. He ignored his brain's repeated attempts to worry about the math of who would be sleeping where. If Brian wanted to sleep with Max, it was fine, dammit. Fine. Besides, he couldn't even imagine ending up on the outside of the bed, with Brian two feet from him. He would _die._ "Is that true?" he asked Max.

"Some of it. Some of it I just make up to keep it going longer. I forget which is which," Max said. He was trying to pinch Brian, and they were getting pretzeled together, endangering the bedside table. Max seemed to be getting the worst of it.

Kevin was elbowing Damien, waving a bright-green ceramic pipe under his nose. "Hey, hit it a while. We've all been smoking already," he said.

Damien took it, along with the day-glo purple lighter Kevin had, trying to look casual. The panic was bigger now, a thick solid knot low in his stomach. He could feel himself trying to breathe funny, that too-short too-fast pattern that meant he was about to really freak. 

He hit the pipe to camouflage it, but Max noticed. "Hey, dude, kid, you're shaking, you okay?"

"I'm fine," Damien said. He was not fine. He was freezing cold and scared to death and worse, he was getting hungry. And his pills were in his duffel bag outside in the trunk of his car. He knew he'd never make it. He had to calm down, he could not lose it, not now, not in front of them, not his first night there.

"You want a Xanax?" Max asked him. 

"I'm fine," Damien said again. He wasn't about to be anything else. Not in front of Brian.

He hit the pipe again, staring at his shoelaces. Black, with little red skulls woven into them.

Brian, in fact, had gotten up and was busy ripping the wrapper off of one of the plastic hotel cups with his teeth. He picked up ice cubes with his fingers from the bucket on the dresser and threw them in. Three Jack Daniels bottles were sitting on the dresser--one empty, one full and still sealed, one a little over half full. He opened the last one, sloshed the cup overfull, and held it out to Damien, rattling the ice cubes like a question. 

Damien took it. He took a swallow that was too long and too sudden, and gritted his teeth to keep from shuddering. The alcohol exploded inside him, scorching his empty stomach like sulfuric acid. He positively hated drinking that way, but he would have rather bitten off his own tongue than said anything about it.

By the time Kevin had repacked the bowl twice, he was imagining he could taste the sweat from Brian's fingertips in his drink, crystallized somehow with ethyl alcohol molecules. 

 

NEUROSCIENCE

Damien, Max, and Kevin were in an animated discussion. They had somehow ended up discussing the relevance of Ziggy Stardust and Alice Cooper as Jungian archetypes. The marijuana and the JD wound together and ambushed his panic, and Damien found himself actually participating. And, to his amazement, they were actually listening to him. They weren't just pretending, either--he was used to that, and he knew all the signs. They were actually paying attention and responding to his comments. He supposed this was what people meant by conversation. He'd never experienced anything like it with anyone but Kate--never with two people at once, and never with anyone whose approval he was desperate to have. 

That was what was apparently going on, at least. Underneath that Damien was paralyzed by the extreme sensation of Brian sitting on the floor directly behind him. Brian was ignoring the debate except for occasional laughter and watching the local news. A transgendered teacher had been fired from the white-collar Baptist highschool, and her appeal had been denied. A reporter with Ken-doll hair was interviewing someone from the ACLU about it.

"Okay, then, fuck Jung. We'll do tarot, then," Max insisted. "The Magician, man...Alice Cooper was definitely the Magician. Ziggy Stardust was like--fuck, I don't know--the Fool, or something.

"Bull _shit,_ " Kevin said, smoking a cigarette now, obviously offended. "Ziggy Stardust was this Messiah character. Like, innocence and all that. Like in 'Starman'." Kevin sang, startling Damien with a lovely tenor. " ' _He'd like to come and meet us but he thinks he'll blow our minds.' "_

Max stared at him, kept the poker face for about five seconds, and then surrendered, liquefied into helpless laughter.

"See?" Kevin said, loudly, to be heard over Max's hysteria. "Ziggy Stardust was like this space Jesus."

Max was utterly unable to communicate now. He was laughing so hard his eyes were watering. He made a helpless _stop, stop_ gesture in the air with one short-circuited hand. Even Brian was laughing, though he did not turn away from the television.

"Fuck you, you know I'm right," Kevin muttered, but he was laughing too, a little.

"Space Jesus," Max said, and lost it again. He ended up lying on his side this time, giggling into the bedspread in an exhausted way.

"Damien," Brian said, still watching the news.

Damien froze, in an over-exaggerated deer-in-the-headlights kind of way, and Kevin saw it and that set _him_ off, which dominoed into setting Max off again. Damien ignored them. He turned, watching the television strobelighting Brian's face.

"So tell me about you," Brian said. It was too heavy on consonants to be a suggestion. 

Damien swallowed, gestured, stalled. The panic reservoir in his stomach jetted a cold thin plume up into his throat. "Um, hang on, I have to get something out of my car," he said.

 

A man in a blue jogging suit waved at him from one of the balconies. Damien waved back, struggling to force the key into the trunk's lock. He persuaded it open. The duffel bag had slid back so far he damn near had to climb in to get it, and when he finally managed to drag it out and put it over his shoulder, it almost unbalanced him. Brian had said the tour might run over a year, and he had packed everything he could think of. His bag was _heavy._ Kate had loaded it into the car for him.

Underneath his bag was the long smooth rectangle of his guitar case. Inside that was a glitterblack Alvarez with active pickups and a black widow airbrushed onto it, threatening to crawl up the neck of the guitar. He didn't know why he'd brought it. Seeing it there gave him a little flash of mysterious guilt.

He left the guitar, lugged his bag back across the parking lot and set it on the doorstep. The pills were zipped into a little side pocket. He pushed four of them through the foil, and worked his tongue in his mouth until he had enough spit to swallow them. He could almost feel them vaccinating him against hunger. 

Brian opened the door just in time to catch him crouching there like an idiot. He looked down at him, and said, "Christianity."

 

HABITUAL

 

Damien stood up, slowly, the pills trapped hard in his throat like a bruise. The flash of Brian as a shadow with black light blazing behind him was freezeframed on his retinas. It threw him into a loop of every rock video he'd ever seen, like he'd stepped through a vortex into 1985.

"Christianity really is about love. Don't you think?" He leaned over, picked up Damien's bag with one hand, and set it aside. He sat down, just as Damien was standing upright again. 

Damien sat down too, way too quickly. Almost a controlled fall. He forced himself to swallow again, and said, "What?"

Brian shrugged, made eyes up at the streetlights. "Think about it. It's obviously not about sex. And fear? Please. I know you have the Red Sea and God smashing Sodom and Gomorrah and all of that--but when's the last time anyone has really _seen_ God do anything scary?"

A brief, ugly slideshow: the drag queens he had seen once back home, in downtown Chicago. Three of them, one of them hardly older than he was, with flawless lipstick and ancient eyes. The kid, who had sat behind him in ninth-grade earth science, who would kick the back of his desk, lightly, in rhythm with the word _queer-queer-queer._ Damien wondered if those counted as scary things God had done. 

He meant to reply, nod, anything, but Brian was sitting so close their legs were pressed together. All he managed to do was exhale the word, "Sodom?"

"The way I see it," Brian said, startling Damien by reaching between them into his pocket, and pulling out his cloves and a lighter, "is that Christians are in love with what they call God. They're in love with eternal love and permanent irresponsibility and a life without consequences. Not God himself, because they have no comprehension whatsoever of what God is like."

Brian shrugged, and stared out across the asphalt. "I like that sticker on your car--'Gay as hell, and not going to fake it anymore,'" he said, and smiled. 

Damien realized he was high enough to actually catch the almost-telepathic metaphor Brian had just handed him, and he said, "This is about me working for you, isn't it?"

Brian looked almost-surprised, then slowly, hesitantly delighted. "Quick, aren't you? Not as vacant as you look."

They almost communicated, but Max opened the door behind them, and said, "Dude, you guys want a sandwich?"

Brian ordered something that made Damien wince. 

Damien requested a veggie sub, no mayonnaise. The guilt was instantaneous. He thought Brian looked at him funny for that, but he decided to dismiss that as paranoia. He worried about money for a brief instant--he had eleven dollars, and no idea when or how he was getting paid, but nobody said anything about it. Kevin and Max prattled at them, climbed over them, piled into the hearse and drove off at a ludicrous speed. 

After they squealed out of the parking lot, Brian picked up Damien's bag and brought it inside. He set it down, sprawled on the bed, and left Damien sitting on the doorstep with the door still open. Damien watched this, and had a deep hard spark of indignation at that, but he went in, and closed and locked the door behind him.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Wow, my camera angles (or point-of-view, if you like a more traditional way of looking at this) are a fucking disaster. Here's the film anyway.

BENEDICTION

"What about your job?"

Damien went and sat on the same bed, between Brian and the television. "You know what. Why me out of thousands of fans?"

Brian laughed. "We don't have _thousands_ of fans. Not yet. Why not you? Who else can I possibly ask? Every other friend I have is in the band already, and anyone else I used to know hates me because I'm selfish and shallow."

Damien had to laugh at that. "You know what I mean."

Brian reached for him, stroked his fingertips along the ends of his hair, the half that lay in a blue curtain against the line of his jaw. 

_You were right, Kate. Welcome to my job interview,_ Damien thought, and he closed his eyes and leaned into Brian's hand, and smiled.

"Are you sure this is what you want?" 

Soft, slow lure of words. Damien shuddered. "Like I have something better to do?"

"It won't be what you think," he warned, fingers moving the design down to Damien's neck. 

_That's what I want._

"Yeah?" He turned his head, chasing Brian's hand, wanting it against his face.  
He moved his thumb along the boy's lips, then cupped the back of his neck, and mouthed, _Yeah._

 

TOXIC

 

"How long should we stay gone?"

Kevin pretended to ignore Max, made believe his entire attention was focused on driving, then shrugged carefully, and said, "No clue. A while, I guess."

"He said 'get scarce when he gets here,' do you think that means all night?"

"Hell no. We'll go back in, like, two hours." Kevin turned up the radio, hinting in the subtlest way Max would understand that he didn't want to talk about it. He stared, and they passed Waffle Houses and gas stations and car insurance joints and a funeral home with a blue neon sign. He was listening to London After Midnight, which Brian hated. He was also chainsmoking, and he desperately wanted to fix, but he hadn't dared do it in the hotel room. 

Max studied this behavior, and said, "You're pissed off."

"Max, I am not pissed off."

That didn't settle it, but Max pretended to drop it. Sean Brennan sang about love and rape. Max said, "Why do you think he's doing this?"

Kevin blinked hard. Makeup in his eye. "Look, I have no idea. I don't care why. I just think it's fucked up, is all. He's just a _kid,_ for chrissakes. He's not even old enough to drink. Did you see the face he made at the JD?"

"So? You were seventeen once."

"Yeah, and I'm not anymore," Kevin muttered, and turned the stereo down. Too late for subtle. They were talking about it. 

Max looked at Kevin for an irritatingly long time, without speaking, just smiling an not-quite-harmless smile. "Why don't you just tell him?"

Kevin edged up from sixty to sixty-five, and said, "It's not like that."

Max laughed. He kept on for a minute or so, and Kevin finally broke down. "What is so funny," he sighed.

"You. You're sitting here in your hearse in full makeup, listening to fucking London After Midnight, going to fucking Subway, moping over our lead singer. You, man, are sooo goth.

Kevin punched him. Max punched back, and in the middle of the ensuing fight, one of them turned up the stereo again.

 

GRAPHITE

 

The television was off. The stereo was moaning old Bauhaus. The blinds were drawn.

Peter Murphy was talking about the cutting room floor and it was kissing and hair-pulling and necking and hands under shirts and both of them kneeling on the bed and neither one was talking anymore. Brian moved back, sitting with his back against the wall and his knees up and pulled Damien closer, shoved at his shoulders until he was pushed down low on the bed, his face close to Brian's crotch.

"Stop," Damien said. Brian didn't. He squirmed, to get his attention, but Brian was forcing his head down and he had to pull away hard to stop him. "Wait, wait a minute."

"Why?"

"Because," Damien said. He was blushing so badly it actually physically hurt. "I haven't...before."

Brian pulled him up, looked at him. "Never?"

"Well...like, to _me,_ yes. Never me, doing it back."

"Why not?"

"Because we were late for class, and I had to get tights and a belt and a wallet chain back on." Damien snapped. 

Brian laughed long enough to destroy what little dignity Damien was pretending to have. "Is that all?" he said, luring Damien into lying beside him. 

"It's been..." He shrugged. He forgot what he was saying and rolled on top of Brian and buried his face in all that hair. It smelled of marijuana smoke and that too-sweet candy shampoo that cheerleaders used. God, sexy. He moaned, very softly, confessing something, and pushed his tongue out and caught Brian's collarbone. "I want to," he said.

Brian touched his face, his eyelashes, his bottom lip. "Open your mouth," he said, and pushed his index finger in and drew a line along Damien's tongue. "Lick hard. Watch your teeth," he whispered. 

That scared him. That delighted him. Damien closed his eyes. 

Brian's finger tasted of sweat and resin. He drew on it hard, forgetting to watch his teeth, ground a line along his fingerprint with the top ball of his tongue ring.

Apparently it was okay. Brian sighed, and rearranged them so that their legs were tangled and Damien could look into his eyes. "Nice. Do that again," he said. "Now deeper...easy...slow breaths. Stay relaxed."

_God. He's teaching me to suck his dick,_ Damien thought. Brian withdrew his finger, pushed at Damien's lips with two. He drew them in without hesitation, and Brian pushed them in deeper, faster. "Relax your jaw more. Better," he said, and rewarded Damien with a kiss close to his eye. 

He was pushing his fingers in so deep Damien could feel his fingernails at the back of his throat. That electrified him, tore him through years of secret rituals and obsessive purity. Didn't he gag himself just this way, when it was too much, the pressure of substance inside his stomach, dissolving into chemicals and keeping flesh covering bone? The marijuana vertigo whispered to him. His throat was callused. Brian's dick could choke him deeper, better, might even make him perfect.

Brian had his arm around him, now, and was making soft insistent noises in his ear. The weight of his arm, the hard lines of chest and elbow and jaw were pressing in. He held the back of Damien's head, showed him how to move for longer strokes, more pressure. "No. Like this," he said, and took Damien's hand and drew his fingers in, etched long rough strokes, then introduced a flutter against the kid's fingertip. He could do it so fast it felt mechanized.  
Damien forgot the rule about teeth again. He bit, then pulled his mouth away and hid his face against Brian's chest and left clumsy kisses there. "Want...I want..."

Brian smiled, bit his fingers back, hard, and let them go, and pushed him down on the bed again. "Do it, then."

Fingers, zipper, the plane of stomach and hips. Damien's eyes were blurring everything, smearing his vision through his eyelashes, click click. Then Brian's erection was against his face, against his mouth, against the roof of his mouth. Open. Wet. Open. His throat closed hard, but this was a spasm he knew. He could do it again. He could do it on purpose. 

Brian leaned his head back against the pressed-wood headboard. He groped on the bedside table, found another Gideon joint and a lighter, and lit it. He stroked Damien's head with his other hand, murmured _good_ and _yeah._ Smoke, between his eyes and the television screen. A late-night televangelist hawking the Bible Diet.  
Finally he made a long hissing groan, held Damien's head close, pressing his cock in strangulation-deep. 

Damien was lost, oxygen-deprived, moaning himself, feeling raped, feeling choked. He was squirming, trying to press his dick against Brian's foot, the bed, anything, friction. His eyes drifted open, once, and he saw Kate's jacket lying on the floor between the bed and the wall, chrome studs gleaming at the shoulder, Misfits pin jeering on one lapel. One empty sleeve was stretched out with NO FUTURE written on it in white paint.

SOLACE

Getting the sandwiches took a grand total of about five minutes, and they still needed to stay out for at least a few hours. Finally they pulled into one of the all-night places, probably a Village Inn or a Denny's. It was redneck-chic, with green vinyl booths and dumb Wal-Mart Halloween decorations. Next to the cash register was one of those plexiglass tubes filled with water and little platforms you could try to drop quarters onto. 

Max ignored the PLEASE WAIT TO BE SEATED and led Kevin to a booth in the absolute back of the smoking section. He dug around in his purse--an ammunition case, metal, that weighed a ton and was crammed full of makeup and candy--and found huge ugly sunglasses with pink plastic frames and little palm-trees rainbowed onto the lenses. He put them on, got diverted by strawberry lip gloss, and by the time the waitress came over (making faces over her shoulder at another waitress about these arrogant _self-seating_ bastards) Max was engrossed in the intricacies of eyeliner with the sunglasses pushed up on his head.

"We should go back," he said.

"I'm not sitting in the goddamn parking lot waiting for slut LeClaire to get laid, and it's too late for a movie," Kevin said. 

Max shrugged. "Coffee," Kevin said, before the waitress could open her mouth. "Bring one of those pitchers. Is there anything on this thing that doesn't involve meat?" he added, gesturing at the menu he hadn't opened. 

"I want a Coke," Max said, cheerfully complicating things, tracing a careful line under his left eye in Paris Blue.

The waitress watched him do this, the way she might have watched someone scratch their crotch through their pocket. She was white-trash skinny, with stringy brownish hair, a beak nose, and thin Southern Baptist lips. She had a cheesy crucifix on, proudly arranged to hang above her apron, one of the tiny gold ones where Jesus was so small he was kind of impressionistic. This theme was continued with a WWJD bracelet around her left wrist. 

She already had her hands on her hips. The only thing left to do was roll her eyes at both of them. If she had done that, she would have turned into a cartoon. "We got t-bone."

Kevin pondered this, and decided the woman was too stupid to be reasoned with. "I want a very large salad. And a beer." He wasn't looking at her. It was pushing his tolerance to talk in her direction. Fortunately, that meant he didn't see her expression.

He thought about Brian making demonic orgasmic noises. In his ear. He watched his cigarette burn while Max ordered scrambled eggs and apple pie. He didn't unknot his shoulders until she left. 

"Bitchy," Max observed. "She's back there telling her friends what a fuckhead you are."

_So that's what Jesus would do,_ Kevin thought, about an eighth-note away from hysterical laughter. "Yeah, well, fuck her." He hoped she overheard. He _needed_ to fix, now. His skin was crawling, and there was this.....pressure.....behind his eyes. And Brian was somewhere else. _And I'm the last thing on his mind._

Max went on, still at his projection volume. Kevin laughed. Heroin. Truckloads of it. Fire hoses spraying it into the sky over a parade. Eight million needles. God, his head hurt.

"No shit. God forbid their ass should actually touch the toilet. And _why?_ Because the stupid bitch before them fucking stood up and pissed all over the seat."

"A vicious cycle," Kev said, in his Rocky Horror criminologist voice. He was mostly ignoring Max's prattling. He was looking over his shoulder too much, but he couldn't help it. He had this sudden conviction that someone was there that he knew, someone that hated him and probably had a large-caliber firearm.

Kevin stood up, took an ashtray from another table. 

"They're just stupid," Max announced, happily, getting glares from a black woman in a nice corporate ensemble. "And they would buy the most dumbass music on earth. Women are the reason that… _shit_ …floods MTV. These pop bands, little teenage boys done up in Hilfiger, and Lilith Fair crap. And they ask _me_ if I've heard this moronic CD, and whether I like it."

Kevin snickered, watching Max's new fan. She was muttering to her boyfriend now, and rolling her eyes. "So what would you say?"

Max was through with eyeliner, and was patting powder across his forehead. 

"Depended on whether a manager was there. Two days before I quit I told this one bitch that I don't listen to that dyke shit." Kevin lit another cigarette from his first one. "You should have seen her. All done up in those stupid baggy pants and one of those little Courtney Love t-shirts."

"That's fucked up, Max. Seriously," Kevin said, and coughed and patted the pocket of his jacket. It was the classic leather bomber jacket, like greasers and assorted hoods had been wearing since the fifties, except it was blinding magenta. He kept his kit in what Brian called the gun pocket, inside left. 

Max drew the symbol for Capricorn in the sugar with his fingertip and shrugged. "This is America. I can be a misogynist if I want to."

Max was cute, Kev reminded himself. Max was good in bed, friendly, kind, and mostly legally insane. He had done too much acid, and most conversations with him were something like this one. He just couldn't help it. The guy was weird.

Their coffee arrived. The waitress was steadily avoiding eye contact and conversation, and Kevin took the pitcher and the cup from her and poured it himself. He glared at the waitress until she went away, and drank half of it in one gulp. His hands were shaking. His knees were shaking. Everything was too fast, too fast. "Excuse me," he mumbled to Max, and he almost knocked their beloved waitress over on his way to the bathroom.

 

Kevin pushed the needle in too hard and too deep and gritted his teeth and pushed the plunger down anyway. He was wedged in the handicapped stall with his back against the door. He could hear someone pissing into the urinal on the other side of the door, rustle of zipper and jacket. A suit. 

He didn't own a suit. He wondered when he'd last worn one. Highschool, probably. Graduation. They made you wear one under the goddamned black gown, even though no one could see it. He'd worn a black suit with a purple silk shirt and a white tie. And combat boots. Polished. And eyeliner, a precise waterproof line. The teacher checking them had made a disgusted face at him, that particular twitch of upper lip and narrowed eyes that Heterosexual Persons In Authority had been making at him since he was fifteen and started buying his own clothes. _Those aren't dress shoes._

_Yeah?_ Kevin had said, handing him a sneer of his own. _Tell that to the Marines._

He'd met Brian two months later, while working in a music store that sold mostly overpriced pop. They'd talked, about Ministry and Coil and how fucked up Florida was. 

Somewhere between those early days--shoplifting and weed and all kinds of dangerous fun-- and this, now, this strange band thing, it had gone bad. Brian had demoted him from friend to employee with limited benefits. Sex between them was occasional, and only happened when Brian couldn't get to anyone else. He hated it. His quiet campaign of escalating behaviors that he knew would piss Brian off didn't make him feel better. It just made him feel useless.

_what….am…..i…..doing……shooting……up…….in…..a……denny's……_

The heroin straightened out the angles of the room, pulled his thoughts smooth and coherent again. He was nauseous, but he figured that was because he hadn't eaten in at least twelve hours.

He fixed his clothes, checked the mirror before he left. He looked like shit. He wasn't surprised. 

LUCIDITY

The next morning, while everyone got ready, Damien was handed a stack of papers in a manila folder with STAFF HIRING written on it in black marker. He filled out a tax form, five or so copies of things that wanted his name and address and references. Some things he didn't have, and Brian told him to leave them blank. He was kind of frozen on the salary--almost four times what he had made as a music retail clerk. He was also kind of stunned by the papers about insurance. He'd never had medical insurance in his life, let alone all these other incomprehensible things. His attempts at doing the math for what it would cost him each month got him three different answers, all pathetic dents in the crazy money he'd be making. Fuck it. 

The other thing that stopped him was the birthday. He'd be eighteen in two weeks or so. He flagged down LeClaire, who was drinking a rum and coke and eating chocolate, and tried to ask the right question. LeClaire stared at him, and politely suggested that he accidentally write the wrong date. Fine. Whatever. By the time anyone noticed, he'd be legal anyway. He hoped.

He signed everything, and gave it back to LeClaire, who wrapped a rubber band around it and left in a stack to go to their manager, a short friendly hyperactive guy named Tim that Damien vaguely remembered seeing either last night or that morning. He hadn't seemed like he managed much, or something. He did, or said he'd do, whatever Brian said. Everyone seemed to be like that. It reminded him of something.

Outmode was a too-slick techno hell, with a sleek sound system and a mutilated dance floor. Max and Kevin set up, with Damien running hectic and desperate from one to the other. Casey and Fathom showed up late, in sunglasses, ignored everyone, and proceeded to vanish into the adjoining room and play pool.

Brian lay on the floor on his back with a clove in his mouth and his arm thrown over his eyes.

Damien did what he could. (Hand me that cord. no, the other one. no, the _other_ one.) Kevin was patient with him, but Max kept hurrying them both, gesturing with his eyes at Brian. Once they had everything running, Damien evacuated to a barstool.

And sat.

And sat.

Twenty minutes later Brian got up, and wandered in a leisurely fashion onto the stage. He tapped his mic, muttered _check-check-check,_ deemed it unacceptable, and made Kevin reset everything. That took another half-hour. After that, they argued over which song to rehearse, until Brian settled on a new one. Finally ready, he signaled, and they began it.

This was not the pretty, intricate, merciless wall of texture he had expected. It started to be, but Brian stopped them constantly. Mostly he yelled at Fathom; the percussion made him unhappy no matter what they did. They started the song over from the beginning, and Damien saw Kevin give Brian a strange look, and drop his hand flat and hard on the strings of his guitar, deliberately making a crashing ugly noise that stopped them immediately, Max in giggles, Brian in a fury, and Casey and Fathom ignoring everybody.

"Shut the fuck up," he ordered, pointing at Max. "And you," he said, at Fathom now, "Get your shit together or I get a drum machine."

He didn't say anything to Kevin at all. He just gave him a look that would have made Damien collapse in terror, and said to everyone present, "We open for Judecca in seven days, people. This is our chance. This is probably our only chance. You want national distribution, you want whores and nice hotels, you want _drugs_ \--" He looked dead at Kevin here, too--"you fucking get it tight. We're better than this."

He waited for almost a full minute, until he had silence and something that resembled remorse, and handcounted _two three four_ for them to start over. Again.

In the hours that followed, Kevin missed the cue for his solo, dropped into the wrong key, and missed his cue to start over. Damien was watching him closely, now, and he was positive he was doing it deliberately. He was also watching Brian, and the level of angry he was getting at was frightening. He finally stood up, quietly, mumbled something about being right back that they all ignored, and wandered until he found the bathroom.

DISPOSSESSED

The bathroom was almost as dim as the nightclub outside. The only real light was a weak flat greenish bulb in a square plastic fixture that was very close to the warehouse-type ceiling. In the wall just below this, there was one narrow window, the kind you could slant open with a tiny crank. Damien was in the first stall, leaning against the wall and shaking. He'd been trying to puke. It wasn't working. He was only succeeding in giving himself a stomachache. He hadn't eaten enough of anything to puke. The only thing he'd had that day was the two shots of vodka Brian had insisted he have. That seemed to have vanished directly into his bloodstream. 

He stood up, knees weak and jittery, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and spit into the toilet. He fumbled in his pocket, and took out two of his pills, covered with fuzz, brushed them off and swallowed them. 

He had to figure out some way of getting to a drugstore or something, to get the kind that didn't have caffeine. Sometimes he would just be sitting, doing nothing, and his heartbeat would kick into third gear for no reason at all, going _slam slam slam_ so fast and so hard that he was afraid he looked funny, like he was blushing or something.

He heard the door slam open, and a smashing wedge of noise came in, hollow percussion through too many speakers, then laughter and something breaking, like a bottle or a glass. Then a shuffling few steps, and another laugh that sounded either drugged or faked. Something or someone slammed into the partitions hard enough to rattle the door of Damien's stall. 

His brain did all the things it remembered how to do in reaction to noises like these--it made his mouth dry, his hands quivery, and his heartbeat rapid. This wasn't caffeine, now. That didn't come with free adrenaline. 

He stood holding his breath, his back tight with the memory of bruises. He knew what he was waiting for. He was good at this kind of math. He'd heard two people--one dragging, and one more or less being dragged--and _one_ laugh. He wanted to hear the other person laugh. Because he was pretty sure that one of them was Brian.

Another laugh, the same ugly laugh, and another slam, this time against the tile across from the stalls, and a soft, ragged moan.

Damien took one careful, quiet step forward and put his eye to the crack.

Brian was holding Kevin up by his jacket. Kevin's lip was bleeding in a thin line down his chin. Brian leaned in, kissing close, and murmured a soft litany that revolved around _bitch_ and _worthless._

Kevin closed his eyes, shaking, and nodded. 

Brian pulled him forward and threw him back against the wall again, and pulled back his fist, but he didn't throw the punch. Kevin cringed back, waiting, his hands flat and open. It looked like a ritual, like something choreographed. If it hadn't been for the blood, Damien would have thought they were playing.

Brian threw two quick, hard jabs into Kevin's ribs, and a third, harder blow to his stomach that drove an ugly sound through his teeth.

Damien winced, and sucked in a silent appalled breath.

Kevin would have fallen, but Brian was holding him up by his jacket. He looked at Kev's face for a long time, expressionless, and then he took his cigarette out of his mouth and threw it. It landed and rolled into the space between two tiles, inches from Damien's foot. They were the kind of tiles that would blur into a swastika if you squinted at them just the right way. The cigarette gleamed there, trailing a hairline fracture of smoke.

Brian leaned in, whispering. Kevin nodded again, not so gracefully this time, and choked back a coughing fit. Brian straightened him up, and slapped him twice, with long full swings, and let him go. He turned and went out the door, without hesitation, without a word. Kevin slid down along the concrete wall, and kept going until he was curled close around his knees. He didn't move. He made one sound, something between a sob and a growl, and then he was silent.

Damien's hand went to the latch, and stuck there, paralyzed. He could see himself opening the door, going to Kevin, and….what? Giving him tissues? Hugging him? And what if Brian came back? What then?

He took his hand away from the latch. He touched his own bottom lip, and then crouched, slowly, and snuck his hand under the door and picked up Brian's cigarette. There was maroon lipstick on the dark brown filter. He put it in his mouth, and straightened.

Kevin didn't see him. He stood up after a long time, and walked like a zombie to the sink. 

Damien stepped back, carefully. He couldn't see Kev, but if he pressed his cheek flat against the rear wall he could just manage to watch him in the mirrors behind the sinks. 

Kev was crying, quietly, and he took off his jacket with pain-jumbled motions. 

Damien watched Kevin's reflection tying up, puzzled. When he realized what he was seeing it gave him a dark, astonished terror. Heroin was a real drug. A really _real_ drug. This wasn't like pot, or the shitty overpriced opium you could sometimes get. This was light-years different from doing coke once or twice a month. And Kevin's hands were practiced and easy, and after he was finished he put his kit away before he even bothered with his wounds. 

Kevin folded his lip back, wincing, and examined the cut. He tore off wads of paper towel and blotted the blood away from his chin, and cupped water in his hands and rinsed out his mouth and spat pink water down the drain. Then, he took a tube of black lipstick and a compact from his pocket, smoothed powder over his face, re-applied his lipstick with meticulous care. He blew his nose in another paper towel, arranged his hair with damp fingers, checked and rechecked his image. Finally he left, satisfied that he looked fine, and no one would see anything.

Damien stood in the stall, still afraid to open the door. He waited for two full minutes, then threw the stub of Brian's cigarette into the toilet and flushed it.

 

A wide hard throb of pain zigzagged into Kevin's stomach just under his sternum. He had just stepped out into the hallway and he stumbled into the wall, and made a very soft and very muffled sound that would have been a scream if he hadn't caught himself. His arms threw themselves around his chest without his permission, and hugged hard, as though he might explode if he didn't hold the pressure in. He stood there panting, waiting for the pain to subside and the room to stop flickering. He had never had anything hurt that badly so soon after a fix, and for a moment he wondered if that hadn't been the sensation of a rib puncturing a lung. He couldn't figure out whether he wanted to puke, or faint, or crawl back into the bathroom and wait for Brian to come looking for him.

The thought of Brian hitting him _again_ made him hiss through his teeth. He opened his eyes wide, blinked hard, and forced his arms away from his chest. The first step was the hardest.

 

_Hell. I'm in hell,_ Brian thought. He was backstage, in the battered miniscule booth that served as a dressing room. The owner had explicitly told them to stay out of there. Fucking little pussy. There was a counter, with initials and profanity decorating it, a scuffed mirror screwed crooked into the wall above it, and that was all. It wasn't as if there was a hell of a lot there to destroy.

He stared into the reflection of his own eyes, the mirror so close his forehead was brushing the glass. He stared, breathing hard, and when he finally realized that deep down in the absolute black of his eyes there was _nothing,_ perfect flawless nothing, he drew in a long shuddering breath and leaned over the trashy counter, and did a short thick line.

 

Casey, Fathom and Max were still fucking around when Kevin got back to the stage. He ignored the looks he was getting and went up to the mic and slung his guitar over his shoulder and went into "Coronary" all by himself, letting the rest of them fall in however they could. He knew Brian hated it when he sang anything with the band, even just fucking around. He was being careless. He had no guarantee Brian wouldn't start in on him again, and he knew that if he did get it twice in the same night while Brian was that coked up and he was that strung out, somebody was going to the hospital. _Probably me._  
He sang anyway, because negative attention was better than no attention at all.

 

MEDIUM

They came back into the hotel room that night pissed at each other and exhausted and crammed full of enough frustration to tear each other to bits. Kevin pushed past everyone else and locked himself in the bathroom. Casey and Fathom mumbled something about pay-per-view and vanished into their own room. Max collapsed on the bed and covered his face with a pillow. 

Damien hung back, so tired his eyes were gritty, and watched Brian fighting with his shoelaces. "I'll do them," he said. 

"No," Brian said, but he sat down and lifted his foot to let Damien untie them. 

Max uncovered his face, squinted until he found the remote, and clicked on the television. It was a hopelessly bad R & B show, with Internet comments running in captions along the bottom. A woman with red extensions in silver Lycra shook her tits above a banner that said 

DMXTHUGZ: YA DMX ON TV IN DA HOUSE! 

TeaSMOKE48: hey ya i would to if i was on TV 

SaraFORny: 2222222222222222222229993333304

LAGngsta666: yo here with the beat goin on 

TeaSMOKE48: is this that chatroom where you can get on the dance party? 

DMXTHUGZ: IN DA HOUSE! IN DA USA! 

 

The drum machine and overdone vinyl spindoctoring backed up this insipid prattle. Max hit MUTE and yawned something about support bras. Damien picked at the double-knots with his chewed fingernails until he untied one of them. His fingers memorized the swishsnap of lace through eyelet, the smooth plane of leather wrapped around LeClaire's calves. 

Brian leaned back on his hands and sighed, flexed his foot, and watched Damien lean back and pull hard and coax his boot off. It hit the floor, industrial heavy. 

Damien pushed that boot aside and started in on the other one. LeClaire looked down at him, eyes heavy-lidded and amused, and he blushed and kept his eyes on his work. 

Max watched this, vaguely disgusted. "Thought you hired a roadie, chicken hawk. Now you have a personal assistant?" 

"Fuck off, virus," Brian said, and ran his fingers through Damien's hair. "So he can multitask. So what."

 

MICROCOSM ONE: DAMIEN

 

When Damien was six, maybe seven, old enough to know that his Big Wheel was stupid and too young to ride the too-big bike his dad had brought him, they lived in a big ratty apartment with cockroaches and silverfish in a big ratty apartment complex. 

He amused himself mostly by excavating and then destroying as many species of bug as he could find. Roaches didn't count. Killing them was work, not play. His favorite things to squish were caterpillars. Those bastards were just revolting, with their spiny twitchy backs and nauseating underbellies with all the mechanics for their legs exposed. They splattered in a satisfying way, without crunching, and besides, one had stung him once at another kid's birthday party. 

True caterpillar destruction didn't come until he found his dad's magnifying glass. Some kind of kid-instinct taught him to focus the sun through it, and the Damien Justice Laser was his new pastime of choice. Even roaches were less work when you could make them explode. Bugs that were normally exempt due to their ability to retaliate--like bees--were vulnerable. If you dribbled Kool-Aid as bait the little jerks would land and stay, and then _zzzzap!_ Vaporized.

It didn't last long, though. His dad found him doing it. Apparently he was some kind of bug environmentalist, because he yelled, swatted Damien a few too many times, took the Justice Laser and went inside to drink beer. Bored and hurt, Damien wandered off to pursue his second favorite pastime--following Lloyd, the maintenance man.

When Damien was older, David Bowie would remind him of this man. Lloyd had one crooked tooth that managed to be charming instead of ugly, dark blonde hair, and a beaten-silver ring that Damien longed to put on his own small fingers. He would wander through the courtyards and parking lots until he spotted Lloyd's faded red truck and then he would follow him around, quietly, often sitting on the curb without making a sound, waiting patiently for Lloyd to fix the air conditioner or kitchen sink inside somebody else's apartment.

Lloyd wore a white t-shirt and faded blue jeans and engineer boots with chains, and he smoked Lucky Strikes and would stand over Damien pretending to be fierce with a cigarette smoldering on his bottom lip, before he crouched down lower and smiled and handed him something…funny long screws or little blown fuses with the glass tube scorched and fogged. Once it had been some kind of circuit board, studded with melted solder and wires on one side, plated a beautiful and vivid green on the other. Damien kept these treasures in the box from his new sneakers. The circuit board was the best. He would tilt it in the light from his bedside lamp, wanting to fall into the color.

Lloyd was twenty-four. Damien's dad liked Lloyd, and sometimes he had Lloyd come over and smoke pot with him and listen to records and drink beer. Damien thought that Lloyd pretended to enjoy this for some reason, though he had his own weed and he seemed to like the Plasmatics better than Deep Purple.

Sometimes Lloyd did drywall with his dad for extra cash. Damien pleaded to go on these occasions, and his dad laughed and said, "He worships you, you know that?" to Lloyd. Lloyd would give Damien a long look and then wink, as though they had a joke Damien's dad couldn't get the punch line of. 

When Damien's dad won tickets to Molly Hatchet, he took Damien's mom in the old Ford and off they went, and Damien sat in front of the television drinking chocolate milk and pretending to watch Superfriends while Lloyd sprawled on the couch behind him, all jeans and boots and English Leather.

"You ever seen any horror movies?" Lloyd asked around his cigarette.

Damien shook his head, dizzy and hopeful.

"I have a VCR," Lloyd said, and leaned forward, sitting now on the very edge of the couch. "I don't think your dad would mind as long as we don't tell him what movie you saw."

 

Lloyd's apartment was dim and smoky and cluttered with records and books in dusty stacks and there were posters of Sid Vicious and Jimi Hendrix and Che Guevara. He made popcorn and put in _Dracula_ with Bela Lugosi and he even let Damien sit beside him on the couch, and didn't scream and yell about Damien wiggling too much the way his dad did.

The movie was scary. The TV was the only light in the room and the music came out of two huge speakers wired into the television and Damien was oh so scared and he'd discovered he _liked_ scary movies and his new purpose in life was to see hundreds more.

Lloyd patted his shoulder when Bela waxed poetic about his wolves. He let Damien hold his hand when the vampire women closed in on Jonathan Harker, and by the time Renfield was crossing the library in that hideous feral crawl Damien was more than happy to sit in his lap, blissfully scared, deliciously scared, and Lloyd gave his fingers a playful bite with his almost-perfect teeth.

 

After that, his relationship with Lloyd was kind of an itchy smear across his memory. The events blurred together into one endless furtive session, Lloyd lying between his legs and doing exquisitely gentle things with his mouth, his hair soft against Damien's thighs, his eyes too-blue and delirious. 

Nothing else changed. Lloyd was kind and abrupt and ultracool and even when they....did....whatever it was you wanted to call that, he was gentle and patient and kind and understanding. He never hurt Damien, never struck him at all, unless you counted the dumb little fake punches he dealt out when they were pretending to be superheroes. Damien wasn't afraid of him. He didn't have nightmares, or trauma, or any of the other stuff they preached about on talk shows, so he had no idea this was technically child abuse. 

He...loved Lloyd, he guessed. He loved him more than anyone else, especially his dad. He kept that love especially fierce and insistent, because in some way he could feel like he had revenge against his dad if he loved Lloyd more.

Years later, Damien broke it off. He was twelve, finally old enough to realize why he had to do it. It took him three weeks of crying. Then he stalled another week, let Lloyd fuck him one more time, then waited till their usual wrestling-turned-kissing session the next day, and said _fuck you lloyd, get your hands off me or i'll call the police._

He'd done it because he had to. 

That night he'd cried about it again, hurting and already missing the closest thing to a lover he'd known. Too dangerous. His father had been on him heavy right about then, and some of the smacks landed with closed fists instead of open hands, and Damien had been hearing _faggot_ whispered behind his back a little too often at school. His dad drank beer and yelled about the queers on TV, and if he had even suspected that his son was getting better head than he was…from a guy who was now making more money than he was…he'd have broken Damien in half. With a two-by-four. 

There was more than that, though, wasn't there? The sex was still good, had always been good, but it quite simply wasn't _great,_ and it wasn't worth the fear. That, and they had started to have differences of opinion. There was this….boredom….now. There was this conviction that there was more to sex than Lloyd's couch and watching _The Hunger._

He wanted Lloyd to start being a little less considerate.

Four years later, he pushed the Deathstyle video into his VCR, and realized what he'd been trying not to wish for.


	4. Chapter 4

EIDETIC

Damien lay in the dark, shaking. It was from pills. It was from nerves. It was from having Brian breathing in the bed two feet away. It was from Kevin's warm presence just beside him. It was from the ugly symbiosis between them running through his hands and his throat and his lungs. He kept seeing them wound together in that strange violent dance. He could not understand it. He saw the same six frames, over and over; Brian's fist pistoning forward and back, and Kevin's hand dropping down and his hair swinging over his eyes. There. Rewind. Pause. 

The look in his eyes, right there, before his hair hid his face. What was that called? It was _i knew it_ and _finally_ and _you bastard_ and _please don't_ and something else.

Whatever else it was, it was familiar.

 _Do I ever look like that?_ Damien wondered. _Did I, before, when…_

Damien turned his back to Brian. Kevin wasn't sleeping at all. He was lying on his side with his arm wound under his pillow, watching Damien. They stared at one another, caught, and then Kevin smiled and said, "Hey."

Damien said it back. He paused, tried for casual, and said, "You okay?"

Kevin sighed. "Now why would you ask that?"

Fuck. "I...um..since you couldn't sleep, I thought…"

"Did you hear?"

He blushed, and muttered. "Saw. I was in, um, the stall. When it happened."

"Jesus," Kevin said, and flopped over onto his back and covered his face with his arm. "I had that feeling, but I couldn't exactly ask him to hang on a second while I checked for feet."

"Does he...I mean…..are you okay?"

"Yeah," Kevin said. "I'm used to it. Usually he's more careful than to get me in the face, though." He took Damien's hand and put it on his mouth. His lip was swollen, and he ran Damien's fingertip along the inside, where it was split and too warm. "I guess he wasn't watching himself, something."

Something weird and crawly went off in the pit of Damien's stomach, and he pulled his hand away from Kevin's mouth and murmured something and tried not to feel the dampness on his finger.

Kevin slid out of the bed, a narrow white shape with messy dark hair, and started pulling on his pants and said, "You wanna go someplace?"

"Go?" Damien repeated like an idiot, confused. He was trying to convince his brain _not_ to check out what kind of underwear Kevin was wearing. If any.

"Just out. You're right. I can't sleep."

"Shut _up,_ you guys," Max grumbled from across the room. Brian murmured something in his sleep, and shifted, and Damien got up on tiptoe and snuck over to his bag, unzipped it, and groped around for jeans.

 

They piled into Kevin's hearse and did about a hundred miles per hour the two blocks to a gas station. Kevin went in and returned with cigarettes and beer and a wide selection of candy. They floored it back and climbed the dumb four-foot fence into the closed hotel pool.

"Peace and fucking quiet," Kevin said. He knocked the bottle caps off of two beers and handed one to Damien. He watched Kevin and imitated him when he took off boots and socks and jeans down to boxer shorts, but when Kev pulled his t-shirt over his head and dropped it onto the pile, Damien got nervous. There were blackviolet bruises fingerpainted on Kev's chest. Not all of them were new. Some of them were so deep that the centers were livid white, pinpricked with blood. _His rings,_ he thought. He couldn't keep his eyes off them, but he couldn't bring himself to stare. 

 

He dawdled over arranging his socks inside his shoes on top of his carefully folded pants. It was hot as fuck, and Kev was arranged sitting on the concrete steps in the shallow end of the pool, stretched out wet and comfortable, waiting for Damien to quit fucking around already and get in.

 _You live with them. And_ he _especially isn't going to care. It's not like it's your fault. Take your goddamn shirt off._ Jesus, he told himself, disgusted with his own weird shame. He pulled it off and dropped it, in something like defiance, and stepped into the pool. The water was almost warm, soft as silk and that clear artificial blue that made you want to duck under and open your eyes. He couldn't make his shoulders comfortable. He couldn't decide whether to push them down, hoping to somehow hide his back, or hunch them forward to make himself seem smaller. He sat down, on the edge, without meeting Kev's eyes, without offering explanation or excuse or even mentioning the long strange scars he had. 

Kevin let him go through this St. Vitus's dance for a minute or so, then he grasped Damien's upper arm and made him lean over. What he saw didn't really surprise him. It gave him a sick little sensation of déjà vu. He'd seen the scars on this kid before he'd ever seen the scars on this kid. "Your dad?"

Damien pulled away from him with a gesture like a violent shrug, and did not answer.

"Why?"

Damien slashed at the air with one hand, and took a long pull on his beer, and said, "He found out."

"Oh," Kev said, and waited for the rest of it.

"It was…" Damien paused, and shuffled his thoughts again. He laid them out again, chose more carefully, and said, "He didn't like the goth, and he didn't like the me underneath it. I told him I was a musician. He laughed. He found some things…" 

He stopped.

Some "things" had been all two dog-eared magazines he kept in lieu of pornography. One was _Propaganda,_ with a special feature on Sean Brennan (lead singer, London After Midnight, blonde, model-pretty, woman-pretty, fuck-me-now pretty) and one was a copy of OUT he'd stolen because he liked one of the models in one of the advertisements. He had come home, walked into his room, and discovered his posters ripped from the walls, his bookshelf overturned, his stereo destroyed, and fragments of paper printed with beautiful men scattered all over everything like weird confetti. He'd had exactly four seconds to be frozen and furious and terrified before his dad's fist had landed on the back of his neck. He'd fallen forward, hitting what was left of his nightstand with his face, and opening a bruise-cut along his hairline that poured blood into his eyes. His dad kept a handful of his shirt, and dragged him out into the living room. Where he had room to swing. 

Kev waited. 

Damien translated this ugly collage into, "He was pissed," and finished off his beer. "So I left."

Kev saw the rest of it in the set of Damien's mouth. He lowered himself into the water. He ducked his head under, and smoothed his hair back away from his face. "You still talk to him?" he asked, moving to the side with long lazy strokes. 

Damien wrapped his arms around his knees. He only had his feet in the water. "Before Christmas, last year. He asked me if I had AIDS yet."

Kev moved back towards him, and tugged on his ankle. "Come out. It's not that cold."

Damien sighed, but he stood up and went down the steps. The water didn't look or feel too dirty, and he didn't see the usual drowned wasps bobbing around the edges, but he always worried that swimming pool water was full of little kid piss and hair lice and shit like that. He started to protest, but Kev was swimming out farther, so he pushed himself off the bottom and did a kind of messy hopping sidestroke towards the deep end.

Kev was already waiting, on the opposite side, leaning on his elbows on the edge. Damien managed to pull up beside him with a minimum of chlorine in his eyes.

"Your mom didn't stop him," Kevin said.

Damien imitated Kev's pose. "By then, my Mom was gone."

Kev had his eyes shut. He made a gesture that was almost a shrug, and said, "Mine stayed. You didn't miss much."

STERILE

Two weeks of this went by. Damien learned quickly, and by the end of the first week he could set up everything without assistance. It wasn't much harder than setting up his own amp and effects pedals. You just inserted tab A into slot B about fifty times, and the amps were heavy as fuck. After the first three days of bone-deep aches and pains, he actually noticed muscles in his arms and chest kind of...tightening up. Stuff got easier to shove around.

He and Kevin became almost friends, and he quickly learned that Max was mostly benevolent, and Casey and Fathom kept to themselves, and allowed only Kevin to penetrate their tight binary relationship. 

The awkwardness around Brian stayed the same. The sex was so good that Damien kept waiting to wake up, but their conversations were surreal and sporadic. He caught himself staring at Brian when he was supposed to be doing other things, and Kevin's nudges saved him from humiliation more than once. 

He had almost settled into a routine. Wake up. Do basically everything for Brian, go to the soundcheck, set up everything, and sit and watch for anywhere from two to six hours, making occasional frantic runs for alcohol or drugs to placate LeClaire. The cacophony that had been the first sound check had smoothed and tightened into eight songs, all of which sounded fucking awesome. 

Damien didn't consider himself an expert, but he had seen a LOT of opening bands, and he knew that most of the problem was that all the songs sounded the same and none of them were all that good. Deathstyle was much better than other "new" bands he'd seen. The songs were vicious. The fast ones were catchy in a dark angry way. The slow ones were alternately sexy and creepy--sometimes both. You could actually understand the lyrics--another skill that he'd noticed a lot of rock bands seemed to lack, probably to disguise bad singing. 

Judecca Tree was industrial, more or less, but their music wasn't quite experimental enough to alienate the metal fans. This left them a niche bigger than Ministry, smaller than Metallica, but their last _two_ albums had gone double platinum, and just about every freak in America owned at least a t-shirt. They were big, and this was a vast, expensive tour. 

Damien felt like he was standing on the edge of….something. He thought about standing in Kate's kitchen, on the phone, looking at her dry-erase board on the fridge (EGGS, PAPER TOWELS, ASPIRIN) and at the wooden plaque by the back door that said SPACE NEEDLE and had little hooks for keys. Then he thought again of being backstage with kegs of beer and sound technicians and reporters. He was between those worlds, and from here he couldn't quite believe either one was or ever had been a real place.

 

That Friday, they had their last rehearsal. Tristan had called Brian and had asked that they have a playlist ready, and trim their set by ten minutes. After much debate, Brian looked at Damien, and said, "Which one should we cut?"

Damien was sitting on the floor, reading a paperback filched from Kevin about gay vampires. He looked up, amazed that he was being noticed at all, and had Brian just asked his opinion about their _playlist?_

"Um," he said intelligently, and followed that with "Uh…" It was hopeless, and he said, "You wanted to know…?"

"Which one should we cut," Brian said, in that overly patient voice that is a sure sigh of frustration. "Biofuck, or Horus."

Damien expected his throat to close and his brain to ice over like an old air conditioner. His opinion? Brian wanted his opinion! He heard himself say, calmly, and intelligently, "I would have to say cut Horus. It's a great song, but outside of Florida you guys are in front of a hostile audience. If they can mosh to it they're not going to care if it's new or not, but Horus is slow enough to lose them."

Brian studied him, very briefly, then nodded. He turned back to his band, and said, "Horus is gone." And he looked back at Damien and said, "Should we start with Sexmagnet?"

Damien grinned, and nodded. "It's fast, it's heavy, and it has enough samples for Judecca fans to like it. "

"Let's go over it, then. In order," Brian said. 

Fathom had been staring fixedly at the ceiling during all this, but he tapped out the percussion to let Max fall in. Kevin ducked his head so that his hair swung into his face again, and dropped his high E to match the B string, and waited for Brian to cue them.

Damien caught this, along with the look Casey gave Brian. Ah. Yeah. He'd just convinced Brian in less than a minute of what Kev hand been saying for half an hour. He sincerely hoped it wasn't _him_ they were going to hold that against.

 

Tristan Blade knocked on the door of their hotel room, two weeks and one day after Damien had done so. Damien was the only one sober enough to feel like getting up, and when he opened the door, his first impulse was to laugh. He'd been watching this guy on MTV for two years, and Tristan was only about an inch taller than he was--about five six. He was kind of relieved to know that the guy who went to Mick Jagger's parties was his size. It made him feel validated. This effect was destroyed by Tristan's full-length black suede trenchcoat, and the machine-rolled joint in a silver cigarette holder in his mouth.

"Hey, I'm Tris. Brian in here?" he asked, looking bored. He stepped in past Damien without asking, with a stunning redhead in tow. Damien tried to wave at her. She ignored him. Defeated, he sat on the bed next to Kevin. Kev was comfortingly looking just as disconcerted as Damien felt. _What the fuck?_ he mouthed. Damien mouthed back, _I don't know,_ and they both watched to see what Brian would do because he was, after all, their leader. Or something. This was a _rock star,_ and Brian was better equipped to deal with it.

Brian stood up, too fast, made handshakes and small talk and packed a bowl and supplied drinks. He was charming. Tristan was bored but professional, and his girlfriend ignored everything, waiting with a sullen look for something to involve cocaine or sex again. She was wearing a white evening gown for some reason, while Tris had faded blue jeans, Doc Martens, and an Atari Teenage Riot shirt on under his expensive jacket.

Twenty minutes later, they were on their way to another party.

TIGERS

 

"...in fearful...symmetry..." Fathom intoned into his Big Gulp cup, in his best death metal voice. 

Casey was laughing so hard he could hardly drive. He pounded the steering wheel and moaned, "You stupid fuck,"

Fathom grinned, and ran with that. "I am a stupid fuck...I am an anarchist..." he went on, in a jagged Sex Pistols nasal wail. 

They were pleasantly coked up, and were passing a fifth of Smirnoff between them that Fathom had liberated from Tristan's party, and every time he exhaled the taste of his breath was pleasantly chemical and inhuman. They were both in the closest state to happiness they ever managed, because tomorrow was the first day of the tour and Miami was theirs for one more night. They were engaged in their best and only hobby, the dispensation of what they called Karma Assistance, or Social Behavioral Modification.

In English: vandalism.

Casey was laughing so hard he was this close to a brain embolism. 

They were in Casey's frightful orange Trans-Am, going eighty-five in a thirty-five, looking for someplace densely packed with cars and sparsely packed with people. A news broadcast was muttering away on the radio, something about continuing genocide someplace that had probably been part of Transylvania hundreds of years ago. Fathom jabbed at the tape deck, and it clicked and whined and finally submitted and produced a furious Henry Rollins (a LIAR) instead of a quietly horrified newscaster (racial cleansing continues in Bosnia...)

"Bingo. Fucking bingo. There it is. Fuckin' Shangri-La," Casey said, pounding on the roof of the car with his fist. It was a multiplex, one of the huge vast glitzy theaters with twenty screens and restaurants and an espresso bar and a full arcade. And there were no people outside, none at all, no cops, no preppy bitches in Gap clothes, no security guards. 

"Itty bitty bitches, itty bitty brains, in the big scary theater to see the big scary mooo-vie," Fathom sang into his cup, in growling trashy imitation of Brian.

"Look at the cars," Casey sighed.

"All those pretty, pretty cars," Fathom agreed, and grinned a mouthful of teeth and threw his cup over his shoulder into the speaker-and-trash filled space that was behind him instead of a back seat.

 

Casey parked around behind the theater, and he and Fathom grabbed their equipment and snuck out of the car. They both wore plain black jeans, the standard issue t-shirts--Biohazard and Front 242--but Casey had heavy motorcycle boots, and Fathom had battered black Converse All-Stars with neon green laces and pentagrams added in chipped white paint. 

There were no people, not a rent-a-cop, not a preppy little bitch in Abercrombie, nobody. And there were rows and rows of cars proclaiming their owners' evil attitudes to the world. 

"Jesus fish," Casey said, pointing. 

Fathom snapped off the cap of the spraypaint and ran towards the target and came to a skidding stop and gave Jesus Fish Car a sloppy hot-pink inverted pentagram on the trunk. Casey was right behind him, laughing and almost drooling with a screwdriver in his hand. He left long deep random scratches, prying off the plastic fish, and when he had it off he took a cigarette lighter to it until it was a very weird shape and threw it back on top of the car. "Strike one," he said.

"Oh, man," Fathom said, closing in on a white BMW. "American Family Association. 'I'm pro-life, and I vote...'" He ran his finger along the bumper, eyes narrowed. "Here's my favorite: 'Christians aren't perfect--just forgiven.'"

"Yeah. This guy gets a prize," Casey said, and put his hand in his front pocket and came up with a Swiss Army knife. He folded out the corkscrew.

Four sets of tires, six tail-lights, and countless scratches, nicks, and slashing paintmarks later, they found a treasure. It was a little brown hatchback with a long rainbow sticker along the top of the back window, a Misfits skull just beside the trunk lock, and a pink triangle hanging inside from the rearview mirror.

"You know, these, we should bust into some yuppie fuck's car and take out his stereo and put it in here. Redistribution of resources," Fathom said, shaking his head.

"Too much time. Too much noise," Casey said. 

"Yeah," Fathom admitted. "We make it with this band thing, we can just leave cash."

"And a note."

"And a note. _Dear sir or madam, we give you this money to buy a stereo or some drugs or a shitload of CDs in appreciation for your brain activity."_

"Seriously," Casey said, nodding. He discovered one of the windows was open about a centimeter. He pushed a fat joint through the crack, thought about it, and pushed a lighter in, too. "Best I can do, man. Peace."

 

It was Fathom who saw it. They were heading back to the hotel when they passed it. Fathom went so crazy that Casey couldn't even tell what he was talking about, but he deciphered _pull over right now,_ and he did so.

 

He saw it then, and followed Fathom out of the car, panicked.

It was a cop car.

"Are you crazy?" he shouted. "There's a _cop--_ "

"I knew it!" Fathom was shouting. "I knew that was too fucking skinny to be a cop!"

Shangri-La.

They were in the middle of nowhere, under an overpass, and the cop car parked there had a _mannequin_ sitting inside.

Fathom's eyes were wide and crazy and delighted. "Get the stuff. Get it," he said, and unzipped his jeans. "I'm going to nut on this motherfucker's windshield,"

"You're crazy," Casey warned him, paranoid. 

It was two AM. There was nobody on the road but them. Nobody.

"Get it," Fathom said, gasping, already hard. He did a strange gymnastic jump onto the hood of the car, a motion so bizarre and so graceful that it made a thick knot of lust close up in Casey's chest. "Get lighter fluid."

"We're going to jail," Casey whispered, staring at the head of Fathom's cock, slipping in and out of his fist, hypnotized. "Oh, we're going to jail."

 

Broken. Glass. Symphony.

They broke all the glass. Windshield, with Fathom's sperm still oozing slowly down it, back windshield, side windows, all smashed completely out into a glittering wreck on the seats. They smashed the lights on top. They smashed the headlights and taillights and slashed the tires and kicked monstrous dents in the sides. Then, Casey figured out how to pop the hood. Massacre. Handfuls of dirt in every fluid reservoir they could find. 

They dragged the mannequin out of the window. It was a white elongated thing in a police hat and shirt, naked from the waist down. Casey held it in his arms, did a spinning ballroom dance with it. Fathom had wooden hurricane matches, and he struck and threw and struck and threw. 

They left it on fire. Fathom stood there spraying more and more lighter fluid into the broken windows, and Casey finally dragged him away, terrified the damn thing would explode like a car in a Bond flick, and it probably did that, but by then they were long gone. 

Casey took all these crazy backroads evading imaginary cops, and Fathom laughed and laughed with his pants still unzipped and his bleachwhite hair hanging out of the open window, pulled out straight by hundred mile wind. The mannequin was half in the floor and half in his lap, leaning its head on his thigh. He had taken its cop hat and put it on Casey. He made this long delighted Peter Pan crow, out into the night, and gulped vodka and strangled himself and choked and coughed and laughed. 

Casey watched him, driving loose and easy with the pedal floored and all the night in the world to drive into. Modern English was slamming out of the stereo, mostly bass, stopping the world and melting in you. There was only the bluegreen gleam of dashboard lights and the wind and Fathom. "I love you," he said. 

"What?"

"I said, I love you," he yelled.

Fathom squirmed back into something like an upright position, turned the stereo down, and said "What?" again.

Casey sighed. "I said, do you want to stop at Toxic Hell, or something? Food?"

"White Castle."

"It's called Krystal, here, you fucking Yankee," Casey told him. Fathom was from New York, and had been in Florida for only three years or so.  
"Krystal," Fathom said, and turned the stereo up again, and wet his finger with vodka and drew a stinging line along Casey's bottom lip. He leaned over, and shouted in his ear, "I love you , too."

 

POSTMODERN

 

Tristan Blade was set up in a two-room hotel suite about six times the size of Deathstyle's rooms. There was a jacuzzi in the bathroom, a widescreen TV, and a stereo system had been set up that had speakers that stood as tall as Damien did. 

Max had found a Tommy. A Tommy was, basically, anyone who closely resembled his two-year crush named, you guessed it, Tommy. Or, a Tinkerbell boi goth with cheekbone-length white hair and elaborate eyeliner. The tink in question was letter-perfect, down to the white poet shirt and medallions and high leather boots with narrow buckles from toe to knee. He was laughing, stoned, and trying to hold his bottle of Kahlua upright while Max growled into his neck, pushing him backwards. They were in the floor in front of the vast television. One of the _Nightmare on Elm Street_ movies was playing, the one where the girl was turning into a roach, but nobody was really watching.

Tristan and Brian were in the corner that had been the dining room of this huge suite. The table and chairs had been replaced with beanbags, and they were sprawled out there with the bong, lying on their backs and talking animatedly. Everybody paired off around the zone of silence that was Brian and Tristan.

Inside this bubble Brian was going all Louis at Tristan like he was an industrial Armand. Tristan was talking about his band. 

Then Tristan was talking about Brian's band. 

Then Tristan tricked Brian into talking about his band, and then tricked him into talking about Brian. He was up to, "I feel like a...like a mystic, or a priest, sometimes, like going this far and being this dark and pushing myself this completely to be utterly flawless, is somehow...holy."

Tristan nodded, listening avidly. "I just see it as theater beyond theater. You've tapped into this hate…people relate to that, even if they're not gay…even the neopunks and shit will get into it. Trust me."

 

Damien was ignoring this snobby musician talk. He was lying across the expanse of living room, on the floor, laughing hysterically and struggling with Kevin. His shirt was off, and they'd been doing some kind of inhalant so he couldn't remember where he'd taken it off, or why he should care. 

"It's a _shotgun,_ you dummy, Jesus, what are you, a beginner?" Kevin said, leaning hard on Damien's struggling knees and trying to grab his wrists. "You're going to make me drop it,"

"Then get off me," Damien said again, struggling for breath. The laughter was like a reflex. He couldn't remember how to stop doing it. And he was getting a really bad headache.

"Ahh, fine," Kevin said, and leaned back and away from him so quickly it was disorienting. He sat patiently and waited for Damien to sort himself out and then handed him the joint. They were their own little clique, now. Damien wasn't nervous. First, because he was violently stoned; second, because he forgot that they were hanging out with Judecca. Well, they weren't, really. Tris was the only member of the band there. 

Damien had been vaguely nervous about their bassist, a guy named Kincaid that was like eight feet tall and had a kind of chaos-punk mentality, and hobbies like extreme hotel redecoration. The rest of Judecca was kind of nondescript, and except for Kincaid they were basically hired help.

The only other people were three groupies, a guy who had brought the drugs, John Carrone, Tim-the-manager, and somebody's stage assistant.

After a million years, they stumbled and dragged each other into cars, and ended up in a scary industrial park where the buses were waiting. Someone--Kevin, he thought--finally had the mercy to put Damien into a bunk. He dozed, too drunk and drugged to get up even though he really had to pee. The bus rumbled underneath him, shuddered, and started to move. He wondered, vaguely, how long his car would sit at the hotel before somebody towed it. It didn't matter. He'd miss the stickers, but he supposed he could get new stickers. All his shit was loaded into the compartment under the bus. Including his guitar. Anything he'd left behind, he'd learn not to need.

HALLUCINATION

 

Damien woke up with a hangover in the middle of the night.

He was in love with starvation. It was his oldest and deepest fetish. He lay in his bunk and ran his hands along his body, very slowly, staring up into the dark. It was not vanity, exactly. He didn't really see this flesh as something he could take credit for. His careful, engineered starvation was more a responsibility than an accomplishment.

Stomach: concave, with hipbones jutting out just below. Collarbone like wire, skin stretched tight over all the bone, cups of bone just above his arms. He performed this ritual by rote, hands moving by themselves. He had this pattern memorized. He was still narrow, still angular. His hands closed around his wrists with the same amount of air between as every other night. He displaced only enough space to hold the shape of his head and heads and lungs and limbs. He was like a coathanger.

He drew in a long, deep breath, as slowly as he could stand to, felt his ribcage open, close. The bunk was narrow and tight, coffin tight, CAT scan tight. An escape pod. A bunk on a bus in a _fleet_ of buses roaring towards Fort Lauderdale, carrying two rock bands, tons of equipment, sixteen roadies, twelve sound-techs, and Damien.

He felt, trapped, or something. Caged. Helpless, and, uh...what was that word? Shell-shocked? No, that was if you'd been exposed to bombs, or plutonium, stuff like that. Traumatized. Yeah, traumatized. It was like Space Mountain on acid. No getting off the ride now.

He got up, as quietly as he could, stumbling from the motion of the bus under his feet. The others could do it. Damn it. He wobbled down the narrow aisle, through the little section that was a toilet shower sink and into the booth of a living room. Empty. A cooler of sodas and beer was wedged between the bolted-down coffee table and the couch. He picked up a Coke, put it down again, and picked up a beer. He spent almost a minute hurting his hand trying to turn the cap. Then he thumped it against the edge of the table like he'd seen in a movie. After two loud noises and one mashed finger, he managed to knock it open. 

There was a thump behind him, followed by profanity. Damien froze, mentally cataloging his sins--not sleeping, drinking beer, making noise, wandering around the bus, etc--but it was only Kevin, messy, no makeup, nursing one banged elbow. There was a joint hanging out of his mouth. "Hey."

Two sensations--relief, and something else. He was--glad? to see Kevin. 

Kev pushed at him with one foot, and Damien shoved over. Kev took a beer, knocked the top off with one casual motion, and handed his joint to Damien so he could light a cigarette.

They sat that way, smoking, the highway rolling away underneath them. Damien said, "I just realized...it's my birthday. I'm eighteen."

Kev thought about that, nodded, kind of smiled. "Yeah, cool. Happy Birthday. Now you can, um, still not buy your own beer." 

Damien laughed.

"Yeah, well, you're not jailbait anymore."

"That's sixteen, isn't it?"

"Man, in Florida it's illegal no matter how old you are," Kev said.

They ran out of stuff to talk about. Silence. Two beats. Four. Then, "So, you want to watch a movie?"

Damien shrugged, muttered _yeah._ The TV was small and shitty, the VCR built into the bottom, the whole thing screwed into the wall. Kev put in _Star Trek IV,_ and they bullshitted about the movie and debated Star Wars ships versus Trek ships. They both waited for the punk rocker, cheered and made noise at most of the dialogue. By the time Spock said _they are not the hell your whales,_ they were so stoned it almost killed them with laughter.

Kev squirmed, trying to lie down, and said, "Um, can I lay on you, do you think?"

"Yeah, fine," Damien said. Kev wiggled around until he was curled up on his side with his head precariously on Damien's knee. It was awkward for about a minute, then Shatner's acting got them started laughing again. This time, after each time they would settle down, all either of them had to do was say _Spock!_ in an overdone Shatner voice, and the hysteria continued.

After _Star Trek_ they moved on to _Mad Max,_ then to _Road Warrior._ Kev was getting less and less hyper, and by the time _two men enter, one man leave_ happened, he had fallen asleep. He was heavy and warm and kind of cute, and Damien's attention wandered away from the post-apocalyptic future and towards the guy sleeping on him. Kev looked about fourteen without all that makeup. He was too pale, or something, and it was like his skin had a different idea how he should look than his skull did. Weird. He was beautiful, though, even though he looked kind of like he was made out of wax.

The road war thunderdomed on. 

Damien drifted off, without even knowing he was tired.

Two hours later the motorcade pulled into Fort Lauderdale.


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Yay, baby LeClaire!

MICROCOSM TWO: LECLAIRE

The house Brian had grown up in was a sprawling tri-level marvel, the pinnacle of the age of merciless interior decor, everything tasteful, everything expensive. Every single room looked like a glossy untouchable magazine photo. It was a Martha Stewart kind of exhibit--practically airbrushed, with Japanese screens and chairs that nobody ever sat in and all kinds of pointless coffee table books that had never been opened. Dad was an executive or a president or something someplace that paid him a _lot_ of money. Mom had been a nurse before Dad made her stay home. 

Brian was bought everything the other kids had, plus everything the other kids couldn't afford. He had his own computer (this was way back, when most people's _parents_ didn't have a computer, okay) and his own elaborate antique double bed and a huge room and his own pinball machine. His room had a walk-in closet and its own bathroom. 

He was not exactly happy. He was very carefully trained to be demanding and difficult and self-absorbed, and he was great at it. He mouthed off at teachers, hit other kids and did just enough in school to get by. Finally one of his teachers got fed up and had the school counselor talk to him. 

He told this guy that he didn't have to say anything without a lawyer or his dad, and then ignored him. The guy was geeky, with imitation designer glasses and a brown suit. He said, "We'll have to call your parents so that we can all work this out together." That was supposed to be a threat. Brian rolled his eyes. If anyone in the room had anything to lose it was the guidance counselor. If he whined in the right tone of voice, his dad would have the guy fired.

His parents came in and swarmed him with worry and petting and sympathy for his vocal and sincere dislike of the counselor. They met with his teachers, took him to a doctor, had him diagnosed ADD, and got him a tutor and a therapist. He sat through this with a handheld electronic game, his attention perfectly focused on it for hours, learning complex and involved skills that would be utterly useless in reality. They talked over his head. He ignored them because he'd long since figured out that nothing they were saying would affect him in the slightest, and he was right. 

His mom did the PTA for a while, event coordinator, stuff like that. She worked for a few charities, shopped, took a pottery class. Then she dropped the class. Then she dropped it all, and dedicated her entire attention to her new hobby, pills. She ate Valium and Lithium and Prozac and Xanax, and she usually added a liberal dash of vodka. Eventually, Dad traded her in for a younger model, a mailroom clerk with better conversational skills and D-cup breasts. He got hair implants, bought an even more ridiculously expensive car, and started calling himself Marty instead of Martin.

Brian had absolutely nothing but a vague kind of resentful hate towards his stepmother. He had seen her a few times, met her once. She'd kind of crouched down a little, in her nasty secretary dress and beige heels, and said, "Well hello!"

He'd stared at her with deep, unflinching attention, without a word. She was wearing too much perfume. She had long fuzzy blonde hair and a lot of mascara and her lipstick was too orange, and was feathering at the edges. He liked her nails, though. Too long, too red. Later that night, he'd stolen red polish from his mother. He'd spent a wonderful two hours painting and repainting his stubby bitten nails. It wasn't a girl thing. It had something to do with how ferocious it made him look when he was finished, when he posed his hands around his face and bared his teeth at himself in the mirror. Mom had taken off his messy paint job the next morning, in spite of his yelling and beginner's profanity.

Trish LeClaire went through a metamorphosis of her own. She went from quiet and depressed to quiet and drunk and depressed to drunk and depressed. Brian kind of missed the quiet part. 

When Brian was nine, he and his mom were moved from the tri-level beach house to apartment in a somewhat decimated neighborhood. The new place was a hellhole with two bedrooms and very thin walls, so there was basically nothing he could do to escape her rambling. She was bitter and angry and whiny and terrifyingly dependent on him suddenly. 

Mom expected him to do things he'd never been taught to do, like carry on a conversation, be affectionate, follow directions, and clean up after himself. No more pinball machine. No more allowance, shopping sprees, cleaning service. He responded by becoming violent, withdrawn, and increasingly hateful. He'd been demoted, and he was secretly fairly certain that it was his fault, that he had failed in some significant and invisible way. Obviously, his mother had, too, otherwise maybe he would have been the only one who had to move for what his dad called "Complex reasons, Brian, very....very, um, well, complicated."

He professed his hatred and his disdain for her the few times he saw his father again after that. This was a clumsy attempt to get his dad to let him live at home again. That was never even mentioned, and Brian couldn't outright ask for some reason. Asking would have made him feel…weak, or something. Like all the ugly and all the scared he had on the inside would be visible.

The worst time was a really one-sided trip to Disneyworld, in which he tried too hard to be funny and charming and enthusiastic, and his father nodded and checked his watch constantly, and handed Brian money, and ate Tums. Brian gave up after about four hours. He walked alongside his dad, and he stared at the kids that were actually...something, their parents were...more....he didn't know. 

He was missing something. 

His dad was carrying five or six bags, now, toys and shirts and an Indian tomahawk and rock candy and baseball caps. He saw other kids with less toys being carried. Something twisted inside either his throat or his chest. He was tired. He wanted to be carried.

He _hated_ those other kids. He was _better_ than those other kids. And then his dad sat him down in one of the overpriced Disney restaurants and bought him ice cream he didn't want and told him that he was going to be a big brother. 

"You already have a kid," he told his dad, in something smaller than his usual loud, insistent voice.

"Well, sure, Brian, yes. But your mother and I are no longer married, and, Maggie and I wanted to have children together. You'll always be my firstborn son," he said, kind of stiffly, like he was making a speech to get votes or something.

Brian looked at him, trying on a new look that looked just like he felt in the mirror at home. He made his eyes narrow and very mean, and his mouth thin and hard and he didn't say a word. It was the perfect death look, one that would serve him well as a rock superstar in a dozen years or so, but right now it really didn't do him much good, since his dad didn't look him in the face. Not once. 

 

The next night, at home, his mother pestered him about his sulking until he told her his dad had ignored him all day at Disney. She called Martin, indignant and drunk and illogical, and after about twenty minutes of weird fragmented ranting, she handed the phone to Brian. "Hello?"

"Son, your mother tells me you said I ignored you. I didn't ignore you. Didn't I buy you ice cream, and that toy train, and--"

"I don't want them," Brian said, teeth pushed together too hard. And he didn't. He wanted something else, but he didn't know what. He would have felt better if his dad had yelled, or at least noticed he was mad _yesterday._

"You wanted them yesterday, Brian. Your mother and I--"

Prattle. You're important to us, we want the best for you, blah blah. He listened, and nodded, with all the gears grinding around inside him so hard he thought he'd explode. They didn't want the best for him or they'd still live in the old house. They didn't want the best for him or they'd _listen_ to him when he said something. His father, in particular, didn't want the best for him, or he wouldn't be having new kids. He wouldn't need new kids. He wouldn't need _replacement_ kids.

When Brian's father talked himself out--nothing more than the same lame concepts stated over and over, really--Brian was finally allowed to hang up. He stomped into his room and tore the posters off the walls, upended drawers, pushed and threw until he picked up the still-crammed-full Magic Kingdom bag. When he was finished, he didn't have anymore Disney souvenirs. Not a single one.

He was crying. He couldn't remember crying before in his life, not without   
doing it deliberately to emphasize his point. It felt different when you meant it. It hurt. This was a million, billion times worse than not getting something he wanted. This was like not getting something he _needed_ and not being able to explain to anyone what that something was. He hated his father. He hated his father's stupid girlfriend. He hated his mother. He wanted to know WHY his dad needed a replacement kid. He wanted to know what was so wrong with him that nobody wanted him.

He lacked the vocabulary to express this, much less the patience to do so, so he trashed his room instead. His mother stood outside, tapping politely on his door, asking if he was okay. He screamed at her, threw various shit at the door. After a while, she gave up. 

That made it intolerable. 

That made all this the worst thing he'd ever felt, worse than skinned knees, worse than the stomach flu, worse than getting an antibiotic shot at the doctor. He cried himself to sleep, another first, in the middle of the wreck of his bed. He hadn't wanted her to give up. He'd wanted her to at least keep knocking.

PRESQUE VU

"Stick your tongue in my mouth," LeClaire whispered. He was holding Damien completely off the ground and spinning with him in lopsided circles. They were in the middle of a huge, vast, cripplingly large, the Rolling-Stones-Would-Play-Here, BIG, arena. Huge. There were more seats than Damien had ever seen. It was like a goddamn football field. 

Hanging on the back of the stage was a gift from Tristan Blade--a vast, intricate backdrop, black velvet with their Deathstyle logo on it in red glitter. It was about, oh, twelve times the size of their old backdrop (Max's mom had made that one). It looked really professional and thrilling and serious and so Brian had picked Damien up in the middle of the center of the floor and was spinning him in circles because there was so much _space_ and they were so excited.

Casey, Fathom, and Kevin were singing some old British not-yet-punk thing, the chorus of which was _we're gonna be rock stars,_ sung in a nasal growl in a classic walkdown. Five, four, one, baby. This was punctuated by pogoing and taking delighted swings at each other. 

Max was standing farther back, staring up at the rows and rows and rows and rows of seats, with his bass slung over his shoulder, missing two strings. "Wow, I so do not want to play in front of _this_ many people," he said.

Damien was kissing Brian, and laughing. His eyes were intricately made up--Kevin had attacked him with access to four different people's makeup bags. This shiny glorious sensation was hanging in the air, contagious, like the best new drug, like the way you thought this moment always would be. Kids, standing on back-porch stages wearing Mom's wig, singing into the end of a jump rope. Lipstick liberally applied. 

_You mean it wasn't a phase? He didn't grow out of it?_

Brian set Damien down, still laughing, still keeping him very close. Roadies and techs and managers and Tristan and about forty other people were swarming in behind them, now. The entourage was kind of fun. It made Damien feel like an Imperial stormtrooper or a friend of the President's or something.

Tristan Blade came in almost last, in designer sunglasses, a black suit, and a white t-shirt. "Go ahead and set them up, let them run their checks," he said to the general array of personnel. Nine or ten guys closed in on the stage, and carts were coming in with crates and amps and instruments marked DEATHSTYLE. Tris pulled at Brian's sleeve. Brian let Damien go, instantly, his attention totally diverted. He followed Tris out onto the floor, away from everyone else, where they talked in whispers, heads leaning close together. 

Just then, an act of God came crashing into the arena. Kincaid. Some of his hair was long and black, and some of it was short and kind of an iodine color. "Tris. Now," he said, pointing first at Tristan and second at the floor by his own feet. "We've got problems."

"Shit," Tris muttered. He grabbed Brian's sleeve, dragged him in a zigzag around his manager and the head tech, and jogged over to Kincaid. 

Damien tried not to watch them. The sound techs and road crew were busily doing his job, and now he saw that there was no fucking way he'd ever really been intended to set up anyway. He was pretty sure he couldn't have pushed these huge speakers around, let alone had any idea what to do with them once he had them situated, or where they were supposed to be situated to begin with. He felt disappointed and relieved and spookily flattered, all at once. He really was here purely for sexual reasons. Brian's fucktoy, drink-maker, boot-unlacer, and professional ego wrangler. Jesus.

Damien's throat hurt. God, he was being such a little pussy about this. Did he really want to do that, anyway? It looked like a lot of standing around, yelling, climbing, shoving, and taping. He would've felt better at least trying to help, though. He walked towards the stage, checked to see if Brian noticed. He didn't. 

 

Kevin was watching this. He had a pretty good guess as to how the kid was feeling. He'd felt the same way. Once they'd started getting attention, local press and fans and god help them, girls, the band had gone from them to him. LeClaire. Suddenly he'd had no say in what the band did, musically, and the only time Brian was interested in what he had to say was when it involved them scoring a gig at a particularly notorious club. It sucked, basically. It tended to peel open all kinds of scars, too. The insecurity thing. The worthlessness thing. 

The kid was going to make an idiot of himself if he went up there. 

Kev caught up with him, and said, "Hey, can you help me unload some things?" The stormtroopers had already unloaded everything, but maybe Damien wouldn't know that. It was pure chaos. People were running everywhere. There was something weird and choreographed-looking about that. It was like watching ants. He was kind of overwhelmed, too, he guessed, but he would live. This was like, he'd...expected it to be. Dreamed that it was. He'd read every goddamn rock and roll book and seen every goddamn rock and roll video, and he guessed if he'd gotten any of it wrong, it had been because he'd underestimated. He couldn't wait for the show.

He and Damien unloaded a few unnecessary things, redirected a few things, and snuck into Judecca Tree's bus. They smoked a joint. Damien lost a thumbwar, for which Kevin got to give him an Indian burn. They snuck back off the bus again, giggling, and when they went back into the maelstrom inside the arena the soundcheck sucked Kevin in. 

Deathstyle was plugged in and ready in under twenty minutes, and Damien ended up sitting in the wings, left side, smoking a cigarette that Kincaid handed him because he was afraid to turn it down. There seemed to be some kind of secret rule about sitting still. You could read, draw, play guitar, eat, drink beer, smoke, or put on makeup, but sitting quietly without bothering anybody made everyone ask you if you were okay. 

The soundcheck seemed to go pretty well, even though it only took about forty-five minutes. They did their first two songs, Brian looking drawn and jittery, his voice tight but dead on target. 

Kevin stood like a zombie, only moving enough to play, not really interacting with the band at all. He was blissfully happy, stunned and captivated by the sound of _his_ playing in a place this size, and he had his eyes closed and was trying to imagine the sound of ten thousand people filling in the quiet and the space and the air. 

Max was hyperactive and relaxed and cheerful and playing with a deep, rich, together sound that drew various catcalls and applause from the people standing around. 

Casey and Fathom played. Sometimes they looked at each other, grinning.

Brian complained twice about too much drums in his monitor. 

Things got ironed out, argued over. 

And then, much too soon, Judecca Tree's manager sent one of the sound techs to drive them all backstage because they had to do their own sound checks and get the arena perfect because in two hours, the doors would open. And they filed backstage in one crooked quiet line, with Damien trailing after Kevin, dazed and scared and feeling either exalted or doomed. 

They had their own, lounge, a kind of dressing room/waiting room for all of them, and they were all painted and all shaking. And then, Max stood up, grinned, waved _byebye,_ walked out, and came back fourteen minutes later with a portable CD player and a CD. He set these down on one of the tables, after sliding a large quantity of food out of the way.

"Um, okay, you guys," he said, kind of patting his hands together like Spock so he could make a speech more effectively, "My mom, right--you know this already, Brian--was like, a professional groupie. And I talked to her last night, she's gonna be here, yeah, and she said we were gonna be like this right before the show, and she made me go get this CD. And I don't wanna hear any whining about the music," he added, giving Casey and Fathom an elementary-school deathlook. "So, um, this is from my mom, and it's supposed to, um, make us feel better. So listen."

He loaded the CD, and pushed play. Track One, Alice Cooper, Billion Dollar Babies.

1973.

Percussion, in a slow kind of thudding march, joined by stunningly unoriginal but sincere guitars mimicking this march with glitzy chords so basic that it was almost cute. All in major, too, these really bangy, glam, sunshine chords. Then Cooper came in, scratchy enthusiasm, and said, _hello, hooray, let the show begin, i've been ready._

Max's mom was right, by the way. It did make them feel much better. In fact, even before Alice kicked in with the vocals, LeClaire knew what it was, and smiled. Not one of his photo-op smiles, either. A real one. And, together, at the right part of the song from a bootleg of a live Cooper show, they made the silly gesture that Cooper had made to shoot fireworks from each hand, out each sleeve.

It was all right.

"That's cheesy, though," Kev muttered after it was over. He was smiling anyway. He couldn't help it. The strange Mexican-tequila song "Raped and Freezin" had taken over and been duly turned down.

"Shut up," LeClaire said. Then, to Max, "Play that one again."

INAUGURATION

This was a home turf show, so Deathstyle had quite a few admirers in the crowd. They were screaming long before Brian stepped on stage. He went to the mic, took it. looked out into the crowd, then to stage left, and gestured, _well?_ The rest of the band was hovering there, eyeing one another. Max went out second, and the others followed. 

The stage lights came up, and the noise diverged. More cheers from girls (and boys) who had just gotten their first look at LeClaire. Underneath that, there was a scattered complaint, mostly males, in reaction to the male-male backdrop symbols. Deathstyle immediately drowned this out by dropping into the first song. 

For the first few measures, people were muttering about Ozzy and Bauhaus. About halfway through the song, the handful of people still muttering were being told to shut the hell up by a pretty even and devoted mix of old and new fans.

Damien was down front, between the barricade and the stage, protected from the crowd by a formidable wall of security. By the time the drilling headhunter percussion had stopped--the end of the song--so that LeClaire could sob _vicious fag_ into the microphone in silence, the crowd didn't give a damn about the backdrop. They were being drowned in sheer testosterone heaviness, and they loved it.

 

Brian gestured at Kev, chopping his hand skyward. _More._ Kev nodded, grinning. More, he could do. 

Their set got progressively more violent after that. The security guys were kind of caught by surprise. They hadn't expected all-out chaos until the Judecca show. They had to break up fights, struggle with the pit (growing exponentially in both violence and insistence) and try to stop the smaller pits breaking out in the stands. Bottles, shoes, sunglasses, lighters and cups of beer flew like artillery. Casualties were dropping here and there. Damien got clipped pretty hard with a full water bottle, but he ignored it. He was watching LeClaire, and remembering what had made him fall so hard in the first place. 

LeClaire was in his element now. 

He was unstoppable. He had them, and he knew it, and it was like somebody had turned his voltage all the way up. People were scared. He was wearing a significantly mutilated leather bodysuit, with the rips held somewhat together with buckles and pins. An involved conglomeration of red chains, the kid you could get in pet stores, was arranged over this like a harness, spreading an uneven web across chest, groin, thighs. The makeup was particularly vicious, mostly black, with red highlights in the eyeshadow that Max was probably responsible for. 

He paced the stage like a preying mantis, lurching here and there, stopping to lean back impossibly far, twitching, pulling faces at the audience. Someone got him with what might have been a bottle. It was a blur. LeClaire picked it up, gestured towards its source. The crowd was egging him on, delighted. He sat on the edge of the stage to see better. The people standing around the guy who had thrown it were cheerfully pointing him out. Brian sidearmed it back into the audience, hard, without missing a beat. Direct hit.

At the end of their set, LeClaire started in on Kevin. He swung the mic stand at him, narrowly missing him and taking out innocent equipment and an innocent tech with a videocamera behind it. Kev tried to hang onto his guitar and keep playing, which was apparently not LeClaire's plan. The noise--a weird jittering static from the overturned stands--sent a small horde of techs running. 

LeClaire grabbed Kev, shook him free of his guitar. It made a great noise, hitting the stage. Then he dove over the barricade into the pit, with Kevin in tow, maybe two feet from where Damien was standing. The audience dragged them deeper. Security was making a real try to get them back, but they had basically no chance. He got a flash of LeClaire laughing, still making periodic lunges for Kevin, and landing punches when he could. Kev's nose was bleeding. Then they were both hidden under a blur of pulling, petting hands. 

Damien managed to figure out which way they were moving from the flow of the crowd. He shoved his way towards stage right, and made it past the swarming security in time to catch a flushed and sticky LeClaire helping Kev over the barricade. Kev was barely able to stand up. He was seriously battered. He was panting and holding his bleeding nose. LeClaire cleared the barricade himself by just stepping over it, brushing off the clinging hands. They were both seized and rushed backstage before Damien could even get their attention.

Darkness. Noise. Then the house lights came up, and someone who didn't grasp Damien's position tapped him, wanting him to help break the equipment down. Deathstyle's first real show was over.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> You should check out some of their favorite bands.

AFTERMATH

Brian dropped Kevin into the waiting arms of the techs. They came at him with tissues for his nose and a bottle of water. Kevin looked once at Brian, eyelids heavy, mouth still. 

Brian turned away from him. He pushed away all the hands trying to help him. Tim, their manager, tried to hug him or something, and he said _not now_ and went past him, making a fake apology gesture. 

He did something like a run directly to the bathroom, locked himself in a stall, and threw up the insane junkfood he had eaten before the show, followed by what felt like most of his internal organs. His knees were like bad folding chairs. He banged his way out by the sink and rinsed his mouth, kind of hanging onto walls and faucets and pulling himself along. His hands were shaking so bad they were blurry. He looked up into the mirror, and his eyes were full. There was some kind of reservoir inside him that had all that….energy had been flowing into. 

Still, there hadn't been enough of it. He hadn't wanted it to be over. And underneath LeClaire the rock star, Brian the kid had been scared out of his mind of all those eyes. 

His lipstick, covered with Coty Kiss-off, was still fine. That stuff was industrial strength. Literally. It took soap and a wet cloth and literal _scrubbing_ to get it off. He let himself smile at that. His eyes were bad, though. He felt battered, still reeling under the ghosts of thousands of hands, pulling and stroking and pinching, as though the crowd had been one animal with countless limbs, one animal that had wanted either to fuck him or eat him or bodysnatch him. 

He lurched his way to the door and yelled out for help. 

Finally some guy came slouching up. He was maybe twenty at the most. He had bottlewhite hair, freckles, a nose that had been broken too many times, and mechanically straight teeth, with ugly chapped lips, set in a heavy prehistoric jaw.

"In my dressing room there's a black leather jacket," Brian started.

"And you are?" Completely unacceptable bored tone of voice. 

_I'll punch him. I'll punch him in his upper-middle-fucking-class orthodontic teeth and they'll hit the tile like pieces of a coffee cup and he'll never talk to me like that again._ "Brian LeClaire. Deathstyle's singer."

The kid sniffed. "Well, I'm not floating crew," he informed him, rolling his eyes. See the bitchy hetero. "I'm one of Judecca Tree's sound--"

Brian grabbed his shirt, pulled him into the bathroom, got a better grip on the back of his neck, spun him around, and pushed him back out into the hall. "I don't give a fuck who you are, bring me my goddamn jacket. Now."

The kid scattered.

He waited, hand on the door, to keep anyone else from coming in. He kept searching the bodysuit for pockets, even though he knew there weren't any. In his jacket were sunglasses, compact, lipstick, eyeliner, and Ativan. 

"I'm not _floating_ crew," he said to the air, in a nasal almost-soprano, and snorted. Little fuckup.

"Sure, you're a rock star. Sure you are," he said to himself. One laugh got out, and he stopped it quick. It sounded too, out of it. Nervous. Crazy.

The kid thumped on the door. Brian opened it. He slung in the jacket. Brian barely caught it before it hit the floor. He stepped towards the door, almost falling, and pushed it back open. The kid was gone. He pulled in one breath, through his teeth. He wanted to follow, maybe explain a few things. Set the brat straight. 

There was plenty of time for that. He couldn't let anyone else see him like this. No way, not even. Not now. Not yet. 

He put on the jacket. It looked pretty good with the suit, but it would have been too hot, too bulky for stage. And the sunglasses helped a lot. His hands settled down, and his mouth did what it was supposed to. He swallowed two tiny pills, gulped water from the sink out of his hand, shook his hands off, smoothed his hair. 

Somebody knocked. 

_If that's that fucking kid--_

Tris poked head in. He was done up in leather shorts and a satin t-shirt, high heavy boots, violet lipstick. "Great show from you guys. Really. Get me after our set, I want to talk to you. "

The door swung closed. Brian exhaled. The door opened again.

"Oh, and Mike says your shirts are selling like crazy. Fucking A. " He made the three-sixes gesture, grinned a purple grin, and vanished.

Brian lost it. He started with giggles and ended up crouching on the floor to keep from sitting down, shaking with laughter. Great. He'd have to delay this nervous breakdown for a while. Couldn't stop now. Their last minute, Paint Shop Pro 4, overnighted to the arena, thrown-together t-shirts were selling like crazy. Hallelujah.

There was still a hole, somewhere, not a big one. His dad would fill it in nicely. He said to himself, in Martin LeClaire's slow cultured yuppie voice, "That was a great show, Bri. I'm proud of you. At least you're making money off of this…..homosexual thing you do." 

It was a recording of what Mr. Martin LeClaire had said after the one and only Deathstyle show he had ever seen. Brian said it to himself while taking a piss, while showering, while trying to sleep. The last three words were the sharpest, the ones that had cut the deepest and left the most crooked scars. _Thing. You. Do._ As if gay were a hobby, like golf. As if his music and his career and his goals and his life and his dreams were all mere pastimes, like yachting.

He laughed again, more ugly and less stricken, and started to feel a little more like himself. Hate tended to do that for him. He pictured his dad in his new, even bigger beach house, telling his friends on his cellphone that his son was just finding himself. _Yeah. I'm finding myself in a Fort Lauderdale arena in distortion and feedback, in a collage of makeup. In the faces of fans._

_Did you ever have fans? Did you, you corporate fuck?_

_Eat this, Marty,_ he thought, and flipped a bird with chipped black nail polish in what he guessed was the general direction of the east coast.

The Ativan dissolved in his stomach, drifted into his bloodstream, petted his brain until he felt hazy and better and loose and good, mostly. He wanted the kid. A mindless dose of brainless worship would fix everything the pills couldn't. Sure it would. 

He stood up. He dusted his pants and his jacket down with his fingertips, pointlessly. Straightened the lapels, ran his fingertips over the Deathstyle pin. 

 

DEMIMONDE

Damien spent a miserable twenty minutes trying dutifully to help the stage techs. A guy in a Jets baseball cap told him to move a speaker ten feet back, and he tried for at least five minutes. He couldn't budge it, not an inch. The guy came back, and pushed him out of the way, disgusted. 

He got yelled at repeatedly. He was scared, frustrated, and embarrassingly close to tears when a bald, chubby tech in a Judecca Staff shirt tapped him. "You Damien? With Deathstyle?"

"Yeah," he said, and pushed his hair out of his eyes. What had he done now? He'd been taping cords to the floor, figuring at least there was no way he could fuck that up.

"Yeah, Brian's looking for you. This way."

He sighed, more relieved than he wanted to admit, and followed.

 

Brian was on an ugly brown vinyl couch, with his feet in the seat and his arms wrapped around his knees, still painted and wound in the terrible messy edible leather bodysuit. The chains, he had taken off, and they were in a glittering pile on the table in front of him. 

He was watching Kev and Max, who were eating pineapple and crackers and cheese and cookies, as though free food were a novelty that might not be repeated. Both of them were still kind of….quivering, from the weird experience of being onstage in front of that many people. They were talking, but seemed kind of subdued, like they were shell-shocked. 

Kev's nose had quit bleeding, but his lipstick was gone, and his eyeliner had seen better days. His hair was pulled back, so that the shaved underneath was showing, and the end of the short ponytail looked sticky. Blood, beer. Who knew.

Brian unfolded and grabbed Damien before he was really through the door, grabbed his arm too hard, pulled him over to the couch. "Some _space?_ " he said, pointedly, over his shoulder to Max and Kevin. Pulling faces, Max nudged Kev. They evacuated, Max making off with a tray of junk food, Kev taking a salad platter. He was limping a little, banged knee or who knew what, and he left a sporadic trail of carrot sticks and broccoli that led back to the table. Max buttonhooked back in, ducking and tiptoeing, overacting to make his point abundantly clear, and shoved two beers in his waistband, and retreated.

Brian pulled Damien down beside him, almost in his lap, putting his hands on the boy's hair, shoulders, face, something between clutching and slow-motion hitting. "Where _were you?_ " he said, furious, or something like it.

"I….somebody told me to break down, and I was trying to….."

"No. _No._ Okay, I want it like this. I'm your job. Okay? You stay with me, you do what I need you to. Nothing else. Anyone else tries to tell you otherwise, tell them to talk to me or Tris or Tim. You got it? I am what you do."

Damien felt like a cartoon character with his jaw turned into a drawer and hanging open. He was blank for too long of a second. Then, "Sure, I mean…..I'm sorry. Whatever you want. I'm sorry," he said again. A bitter, familiar feeling was crawling up from his scrotum to his stomach to his throat. Guilt? Love? Whatever it was, it was heavy, and strange, and it tasted….good, the way penicillin tasted good about five minutes after you swallowed it, when the initial chemical/bitter flavor became this icky kind of sweet aftertaste.

Was love supposed to be like that, like a medicine you knew you needed, but you hated? He didn't know. He was pretty sure Brian was the first person he had ever, really….

"I need…" Brian stopped. Rephrased. Just in time. "I need you to make sure I have…..everything I need. If you can't do that, I'll find someone who can."

"I can, I can do that," Damien said, desperate now. He wasn't doing anything right today. He had a deep, hard, odd wish: that Brian would hit him, mess him up like Kevin, so that this feeling of failure would be kind of justified, rectified. Under that, this nasty jealous tinge, this conviction that he would be a better….punching bag, than….."I'm really sorry. I was trying to do whatever they told me--"  
"Only what _I_ tell you," Brian said, emphasizing this by tightening his hands. "Nothing else is important." His grip too was hard over the kid's collarbones. Chemical reactions unfolded from these points of contact, and the future modified itself accordingly.

Damien leaned in, drawn by this messy stage paint and leather and Brian's wet hair. All of it was a hook in him, swallowed willingly, wound inside him. He wrapped his arms around LeClaire, kissed his cheek, his neck, still apologizing in broken sentences. It was still a miracle to him, however tainted, that this wet-dream avatar was his, here in front of him, and that sometimes, when he was lucky, he could touch.

Brian pushed at him, halfheartedly, and then leaned back, not really interacting, just taking. That was exactly as it should be, and they both knew it.

ABSOLUTION

Damien trailed Brian obediently for the next three hours or so. He felt pretty invisible, especially after Judecca finished their set (and two encores) and came backstage, followed by groupies in ever-increasing numbers. LeClaire signed autographs, smiled, posed for pictures, made small talk. Tristan, of course, got the lion's share of the attention, but the Deathstyle crowd was bigger than Damien would've predicted. 

He was mostly ignored, which was fine with him. He hadn't eaten since about noon the day before, and that had been four pieces of celery and half the chicken part of a grilled chicken sandwich. 

One of the biggest worries he'd had about this job was that being so surrounded might interfere with his non-eating habits. So far, the only person who ever seemed to notice was Kevin. Damien usually said he'd already eaten, or was too wound up, or something. Kev usually dropped it. Once he'd tried to tempt Damien with a bite of some evil chocolate-and-cherry cake, held out on a swooping fork. Damien had cringed, literally cringed, as if Kev had tried to give him a spoonful of scorpion. On fire. Everyone had laughed, like it was a joke, assuming he was just being dramatic. Kev had eaten his own bite of cake without further harassment.

He had his arms inside his shirt, and was in an uncomfortable doze when Brian put his hand on the back of his neck. He realized he was asleep, sitting in a folding chair. The groupies were drifting away. "It's after one," LeClaire told him. "There's a party."

Oh, great. Wonderful. Maybe at least he could be Invisible Boy on a couch, someplace that wasn't freezing. He blinked, his mouth dry. "Um, ok--"

"Did you want to go?"

That was almost confusing. Damien thought for about fifteen seconds that LeClaire was being considerate, until he realized that he was kind of being uninvited. He flushed. "You guys can go, I'll get back to the room, somebody must be going….back to the…."

Apparently he'd gotten something wrong anyway, because LeClaire was frowning. He sighed, and said very slowly, as if Damien were stoned or not very bright, "I don't want to go to the party. If you want to, go with Kevin. I'm going back to the room."

He waited.

Damien got it, then. It would've been easier, but sleepy and hunger was making everything seem about five feet underwater, like in a dream. "I want to go with you," he said. 

LeClaire touched his face, surprising him, put his fingertips under his chin and tilted his head back. Damien looked up at him, same old wonderful bird/snake dynamic. Brian was lit up from the inside, ego petted and drugged into blazing satisfaction. "You were cute, sitting there sleeping," he said. His hand moved down to Damien's shoulder, just under the neck of his shirt. "And you're freezing."

"I'm sorry," Damien said. It didn't make any sense, but it usually seemed like the safest thing to say to LeClaire. 

LeClaire took his hand and pulled him up. He took his jacket off and thumped it down around Damien's shoulders. It was so heavy it felt like armor. He put his arms into it, surrounded by warmth and weight and the smell of clove smoke and some kind of darksharp cologne and marijuana and leather. It was the scent of something you should eat very slowly with an expensive spoon and chocolate sauce. It threw the wrong switches in his brain, and his stomach stabbed him with such an insistent hunger pang that he drew his shoulders in, teeth clenched. 

The jacket swallowed him whole. The sleeves were about six inches past the tips of his fingers, the leather too thick to push up and the cuffs much too large to catch on his birdbone wrists. He thought of the preppy girls wearing the lettermen's jackets, strutting around in his long abandoned highschool, and made himself straighten his shoulders and his back. 

Someone came over in reply to LeClaire's gesture. He kept Damien's wrist, through the jacket, which was nice. He wanted to lean into him. God, he was sleepy. He let himself be led, through hallways, past roadies shoving huge boxes with DEATHSTYLE and JUDECCA TREE stenciled on them, under a red EXIT sign and into a parking lot. It was warmer here, but he was still cold. 

He stumbled, and LeClaire laughed at him, not sounding mean, just amused. He let go of his arm, did a kind of a lunge and picked Damien up, starting a weird noise out of him. 

"Quit yelling, or I'll drop you," he ordered, still laughing. He was high on something, or several somethings. He held Damien like he was a kid, one arm under his back, one under his knees. He jolted him deliberately, letting him slip about half a foot. Damien clung. 

He couldn't remember the last time anyone had held or carried him. Lloyd, probably. 

LeClaire wasn't even changing his pace, still moving at a fast walk towards whatever car was waiting. It felt crazy to be carried. Out of control. Powerless. Something. Like being kidnapped. 

"God, you're so light. How much do you weigh?"

This Christmas feeling went off in his stomach, replacing the ache. "One-twenty," Damien said. Maybe true, with his boots and LeClaire's jacket. 

LeClaire leaned his head in and drew in a long predator breath beside Damien's neck. It scared him. He loved it. He might never eat again.

 

OCCULTATION

Kev was in the women's bathroom with two girls, one of them tying him off and the other one injecting him expertly with a generous fix of the best heroin he'd had in a month. Then, kind of a cut to Scene Two, in which he was lying on the tile floor and ineptly kissing one of them--blonde, probably a minor, and the less horrifying of the pair. The other one, heavyset, in a fake leather dress with hair dyed blue and orange, had been puking mostly in one of the toilets, and somehow managing to giggle at the same time.

He tried to turn over to get this spectacle out of his view, and managed to simultaneously pull the blonde's hair and lean his elbow hard into her ribcage. She was whining, and he tried to apologize, and halfway through it she grabbed his hand and put it up her shirt. She was warm, soft, really quite pretty now that he was looking at her, and he petted her as best he could because it seemed to make her happy, and either she or her friend had given him this deliciousness spreading through him. He owed them something, he guessed. 

After that, things got even more film school, and the next thing he was aware of was being at the party. He knew it was a party because of the music, the loud and confused conversations being yelled over the music, the smell of pot, and the fact that he was looking up at a ceiling fan with glow-stars stuck to it. A bedroom. The only light was the flickering cyan of a television somewhere behind him. 

He was lying down, he guessed. 

He tried to sit up, and a pair of massive hands in cut-off vinyl gloves closed over his shoulders and slammed him back down. Ah. That was an erection under jeans his cheek was resting on. He wasn't sure whose. He squinted, turned his face back towards the owner of the hands. He didn't know who in the hell it was. Black hair, mostly dreaded on top, not as long as Max's, shaven close and dyed orange from the temples down, and pulled up into a messy topknot with a vinyl scrunchy. Makeup that looked like it had once been black lipstick and a black horizontal bar across cheekbones and nose. Creepy eyes--so dark they were almost black, deepset, emotionless. Silver septum ring, fairly heavy gauge, a six or a four. It still looked pretty dainty on this guy. He was huge. Not fat, just about seven feet thirty of solid muscle wrapped over prehistoric-sized bones. The shirt was a minefield. It looked like three or four rotting punk band shirts, patchworked together and held with rivets. 

Kincaid. Bassist for Judecca Tree, Chaos-goth of doom. 

"Yeah….hi," Kevin started. 

Kincaid put one hand over his mouth (and most of his face) and said, "I saved you. But if you can't be quiet so I can watch this, I'm going to have to kill you."

Well. Ok, then. Great. He nodded, making the motion tiny. Kincaid took his hand away. His eyes drifted back to the TV. 

After about ten minutes of this, Kev was getting kind of nervous. The hard-on he was lying on was still there, but Kincaid didn't seem to be interested particularly in any kind of rape activity. Thank god for that--it felt like this guy's dick was the size of Kev's arm.

Finally, he worked up enough courage to whisper, "Can I turn over a little to watch TV?"

"Yeah, sure," Kincaid said, absorbed in whatever it was.

Kev wiggled onto his side, his head still in the guy's lap. It took him a minute to realize what they were watching. A nature show. Apparently, the topic was Bugs Eating Each Other. A praying mantis was ripping some other bug into pieces and stuffing them casually into its mouth. _This is making him hard?_

A terminal case of the suicidal giggles threatened, somewhere between his collarbone and the back of his tongue. He bit his lip, hard. What would that be called? Insectophile? Insectosexual? He was quivering, now, every breath he took leaving him in pained little puffs through his nose and between his teeth.

Kincaid patted his head, his eyes never drifting from the TV, as if he were a housecat. The size and weight of the hand patting him killed the giggles pretty quickly. He tried to give some kind of a damn about the tarantulas that were chomping away now, and prayed that Max or somebody would come looking for him soon. Preferably with reinforcements.


	7. Chapter 7

MERCURIAL

LeClaire didn't put him down, so in the back seat Damien ended up in his lap. He expected gratuitous sex, but Brian only held him, looking out the window as though he'd forgotten about him. He tried not to move. It was pretty uncomfortable, because his brain insisted that he was heavy, that he would hurt LeClaire or put his leg to sleep, something. He was troublesome in some way, he had to be. 

Once they got to the hotel, a new one that was about sixty times less ghetto than the old one, LeClaire opened the door and pushed at him. He got out, and Brian followed him, steering him with one hand on his back to their room. 

One double bed, and Damien's bag and guitar case were nestled beside LeClaire's stack of suitcases and makeup kits just inside the door. The room was three times the size of their old one, with a huge TV and a stepdown into a smaller section with a couch and a table with four chairs. Their room.

Damien put his hand over his stomach again, tried to do the alchemy that would transfer this gluttony of wishes granted into something that would fill up the appetite there. 

He didn't have time to succeed. LeClaire pushed past him, and said over his shoulder, "Take all that off."

This was new, and he was pretty sure he didn't like it. LeClaire sprawled on the bed, clicked on the TV, but didn't watch it. Damien shrugged out of the jacket, found a chair and put it carefully over the back. He felt this unexplainable urge to stall. "Are you--"

Apparently in higher-class hotels the remote didn't come stuck to the nightstand table. LeClaire sidearmed it at him. Hard. It struck the wall behind him with a loud _smack_ and shattered. LeClaire's expression didn't change. 

A program that hadn't opened in his head since he left home overrode everything else, and Damien's hands flew to the bottom of his shirt, pulling it over his head. Too late. LeClaire did his eerie serpent-fast lunge and grabbed him, swung him around and threw him down on his back on the bed. Damien landed hard enough to almost knock out his breath. He made one sound, startled and hurt, but not a protest. That wasn't a possibility. 

LeClaire pulled his shirt the rest of the way off and threw it. He unsnapped and dragged down Damien's pants and boxers in one rough motion, snagging him hard enough to hurt. Everything hung up at his boots, and LeClaire yanked at the laces and twisted them off without loosening them enough, hurting ankle and knee bones indiscriminately. It dragged Damien almost off the bed. He wasn't crying yet--he was still too shocked, still lacking in breath, but his eyes were wet and stinging, and his throat hurt. The ring through his belly button had gotten caught on something during this, and it was a bright flare of pain, as if someone was holding a lighter to it. He was naked now, except for one black sock that LeClaire hadn't bothered to pull off. "What did I do?"

LeClaire stood up, tossed the bundle of pants and shoes aside without looking where it landed. This was the same look he'd given Damien an eternity ago when they'd collided on a tiny nightclub stage. "You want to try again for how much you weigh?" he said. His voice was all at one frequency, like a recording.

Damien wanted to fold up small, hide his face, something, anything. This bone sculpture art that he had suffered for four years to build was laid out in plenty of light with no excuses, now. "Last time I checked, ninety-four," he said. He looked away, past LeClaire at the ceiling. 

LeClaire leaned over him and grabbed his jaw with one hand and forced him back into eye contact. He didn't say anything. He just stared, and tightened his grip every time Damien's eyes wavered. He closed them finally, defeated.

LeClaire slapped him. Hard. He did a kind of shriek with his mouth closed, but he didn't pull away. "Don't you ever lie to me again," he said. He closed his fingers hard, one time, and let go.

Damien turned over on his side and pulled his knees up to his chest. It was the first time LeClaire had ever hit him, outside of a few wonderful playful smacks on the ass, or punching him in the arm during random horseplay. This was different. It fractured the guilt inside him, made it drift around his bloodstream in jagged chunks, tearing him in places. He wanted to cry, and his eyes were wet and leaking, but his lungs and his throat wouldn't oblige him.

He could hear Brian moving, heard a strange and ominous click. He opened his eyes. Brian had picked up the phone. He held Damien's gaze, and said, "Yeah, I need room service."

Terror. Cold, heavy terror. Stomach full of fishhooks terror. "Please--" he said, starting to shake, now.

LeClaire made one sharp diagonal gesture. "Yeah, I understand that… I don't care what the normal hours are." A brief silence. He rolled his eyes and interrupted with, "Look, sweetheart, get me your manager then. Yes. Yes, but I'm not known for my patience." He put his hand over the mouthpiece and told Damien, "Get dressed."

 

LeClaire charmed, bullied, and bought his way into room service four hours after the kitchen had closed. Forty-five minutes later they brought a cart laden with covered dishes. The smell was like heaven and hell together. 

Damien sat in the chair LeClaire had ordered him into, at the table, and LeClaire set a plate in front of him, heavy with steak and potato and steamed asparagus. _Don't make me,_ he thought, with zero hope of having his prayer granted.

"New rules," he said, uncovering his own plate and handing Damien a knife and a fork. "You eat three times a day, every day. You weigh no less than one fifteen, and that's pushing it. After that if you want to eat three salads a day, fine. Until then, you eat whatever I tell you to. And If I catch you not eating, or taking pills, I will make you instantly sorry. Now eat."

Tears. He couldn't. His hands wouldn't move, his mouth wouldn't open. He felt about five years old, and he wished he were either invisible or dead.

"Damien," LeClaire warned him. "I explained this to you at the arena. You're mine. If I want you to starve, _I_ will starve you. Eat."

Damien ate, after a while. It was hard. Chewing felt like this unbelievable effort, and swallowing was almost impossible. It made his stomach ache almost immediately. After a few minutes, it got a little easier. His hunger returned with a vengeance, and he had to fight himself not to gorge. He even ate the asparagus, and he hated every single kind of green cooked vegetable. It wasn't as bad as he remembered.

His drive to obey LeClaire was stronger than the fear of food or fat, stronger than the conviction that he had no right to consume food or take up space, stronger than anything in him. But it hurt. He was crying. LeClaire ignored it.

He'd dropped his tolerance after so many months of near-starvation. He was about halfway through when he put down his fork.

"You better pick that back up," LeClaire said, without even looking at him. He'd finished eating, and was still sitting across from Damien, turned slightly to watch television. It was on MTV. A redundant girl-with-guitar angsty thing that wanted really badly to be the Indigo Girls. This faded into some kind of commercial about dying of lung cancer.

"I can't eat anymore."

LeClaire stood up, pushed his chair under the table, and took two steps around to behind Damien. He leaned in close, and said. "One. Two--"

Damien picked it up. He didn't want to know what three involved.

 

VERBOTEN

Kevin came staggering down the hall about two hours later, with Max in drunken tow. Their room was beside LeClaire and Damien's. Damien was sitting in the hallway with sunglasses on, between the two doors. He looked--odd. Like he'd been crying. And he was sitting weird, like he was hurt.

"You ok?" Kevin said, kind of leaning Max against the door and fumbling for their key. Damien shook his head without answering. Kev frowned, gave up on his pockets, and dug through Max's. Bingo. "One sec, let me put this heavy bastard in bed."

He got the door opened, and he and Max fell inside. Thumping, cursing, quiet, and Kev reappeared and closed the door behind him. "There's a hot tub. Come on."

Damien stood up, using the wall a lot. He followed Kev, but he still didn't talk. 

 

The hot tub was outside, by a pool, underneath a gazebo. Kev had to undress Damien, more or less. He got him down to boxers and peeled himself out of his clothes, and settled down beside him. He was looking for bruises, and he didn't see any, but sometimes it took a while for marks to show up. "Did he hit you?"

Damien shook his head, still masked behind the sunglasses. He said something that was too soft to hear. Kev leaned closer, nudged him, and he repeated it. "He made me eat."

That wasn't on any of the lists of things Kev had expected. He fumbled around it, blushing, his brain giving him a blurry menu of really terrible ideas. "Um….exactly, what, did he make you eat?"

Damien went through the list, in that same almost-whisper. Steak, potato, asparagus. He was cataloging very precise amounts of everything, down to teaspoons of butter and calories-per-serving. 

Kev still didn't get it. "Well, you look, like, he kicked the shit out of you, or something, are you sure that's all he did?"

 

"I don't eat!" Damien burst out. He shoved himself over to the other side of the hot tub, and huddled there, breathing funny. 

Kev waited. This was still a mystery to him.

Damien said, "I eat one time a day, maybe. I take pills. I just want to be, skinny. It makes me feel weird to eat. It's not like I'm gonna starve. People in China or whatever eat less than I do."

Ah. Kev seen stuff on TV about anorexia, but he thought that was when you puked up everything you did eat. Or was that fibromyalgia? 

He slid over closer to Damien, tried to pat him or hug him, something, but the boy shoved his hand away, and rearranged his arms around his stomach again. "You don't get it," he said, accusingly. "I never eat. Not like that. And he stood over me. And he wouldn't let me stop, and I--" 

He was crying, now. He pulled off the sunglasses and dropped them to scrub at his eyes. He tried to get out of the tub, figuring he could go hide on the bus, or something. Kev grabbed his wrist and dragged him back down. "Did you talk to him about it?"

Damien shrugged. "You can't talk to him about anything. You know that."

Hmm. "Well, maybe it'll be good for you. You're skin and bone, now, you know."

Sniffles. Anger. "He wants me to be one _fifteen._ "

"Well, I'm only like five inches taller than you, and I weigh one-forty. I'm not fat, am I?" 

Kev puffed out his twig chest, to make Damien laugh. He got a smile, at least, even if it was on top of another sniffle. "It'd be different if he was doing it because he, cared." Voice break on this, but he caught it and kept it under control. "He'd doing it the way you'd take a dog to the vet. Like I'm property that he doesn't want to get, wrecked."

Yeah. He understood that. LeClaire had hospitalized him, long ago, during the brief time he'd been property. And he probably should have gone to the emergency room a lot more times than that. Some of those, recently.

Kevin looked at Damien, at that kitten face and mournful eyes. All this over perfectly normal food. It wasn't the food, though. That was, like, a symptom. It was about control and the shadow of some dickhead sperm-donor of a dad. He meant to ruffle the kid's hair, but he missed, and put his hand on the back of Damien's neck. He thought, _when he's through with you, do you think you might let me have what's left of you?_

It was too wide and broad to keep inside him, and he slid over and pulled Damien's head closer and fucked up completely by kissing him.

_Oh no,_ he thought, and then just system failure, some kind of electric, bright, fusion sensation, spreading from his mouth down his neck into his lungs. 

He'd never felt anything like it. 

He'd had plenty of kisses that made his knees weak and his heart hammer, but none that felt like this. 

Nothing even close, to. 

This. 

Holy. Something. 

This one brief tongueless kiss.

He leaned his head back, horrified by what he'd just done. "I didn't…mean to…wow, I…."

"Yeah, I know," Damien said, pulling against Kev's hand until he let go, and sliding a safer distance away. He wasn't making eye contact. He put one (trembling?) hand to his mouth, then took it away. "Don't worry about it."

"I mean, I don't mean that I didn't want to, only that I don't have any business, to, um. Fuck," Kev decided to end on that note. He patted around the edge of the hot tub, found his pants and the cigarettes in the pocket. He lit one, and it felt funny in his mouth for some reason, like another mistake. 

Damien looked at him then, one stolen look, and then the sound of footsteps stopped both of them. 

"It's LeClaire."

"How do you know?" Damien was looking at his pants, his shirt, twitching towards them, then away from them. He was allowed in the hot tub, sure he was, it wasn't like he was being caught at anything, was it?

"I just know," Kevin said. He pulled on his shirt, gymnastics around his cigarette. It stuck to him in triangular wet patches. Damien pulled his eyes away from that, opted to settle down and pretend he was relaxing. 

It wasn't LeClaire. It was a chubby white guy in a white shirt, some kind of staff. He made a little perfunctory wave and smile, and Kevin waved back. After he had walked past, they both did an invisible collapse of tension. 

Damien climbed out, got dressed. Kev showed no signs of leaving, sitting with his bare feet in the tub, hair dripping down his collar, smoking. 

"Um, I'm going to, you know….." He gestured back in the direction of his room. His and LeClaire's room. 

"Yeah," Kev said. "Night."

_He's beautiful,_ Damien thought, realized, wondered. Right down after that like a program, a floodgate slamming closed, _LeClaire is beautiful. Kevin is pretty._ But he looked at Kev's silver hoop earrings, at the choppy ends of his black hair, and wondered if that might not be a lie.

 

KARMA

Damien walked around the hotel for a few minutes, touching his mouth until it made him crazy and he shoved his hands in his pockets. He could still feel Kevin's kiss--soft and gentle and threatless. It had made him want to, scream, recite a list of every awful thing he'd ever done. _Don't kiss me like that. Don't kiss me like I'm clean. Don't kiss me at all. Don't._

He wanted to go back to the hot tub. He wanted to punch Kevin, maybe. Would that fix it? He pulled one hand out of his pocket, balled it into a fist. He didn't know how to arrange his thumb, whether to straighten his wrist or bend it. Fag to the core. He'd have to watch how LeClaire did it, next time. 

His hand balled itself up again, and he shoved it back into his pocket so he wouldn't have to look at it. He wanted LeClaire. He wanted to have fewer things rattling around inside his head. 

Their room was darker, once he got back. The plates were gone, and candles were lit, and two sticks of incense propped in a beer can were sending tendrils of darkcherry smoke into the air. The television was off, for once, and the Sisters of Mercy were singing about a black planet on Max's little boom box on the table.  
LeClaire was lying across the bed, in black vinyl pants and nothing else, smoking a clove with his free arm wrapped up over his head, fingers tangled in his hair. His eyes were closed. Damien stood with his back to the door, eyes starved for this picture. Smoke like burning candy, stinging his eyes. 

"Does it make you feel better to whine to my guitarist?" LeClaire said, without opening his eyes. No particular tone of voice. Just this test making room for itself in the air.

"I didn't whine," Damien said, flushing. "He asked me what happened."

"He's funny that way," LeClaire said, unfolding himself and sitting up in one rolling arc, pulling his head up and opening his luminous eyes. "Thinks everything I do is his business."

Was he mad? At LeClaire? Was that possible? This didn't feel like mad, it hurt too much, and he wanted to feel the way he _always_ felt about LeClaire again, goddammit Awe and lust and amazement and worship and awe and lust. "We were just, talking, and I came back, because I want to talk to you instead."

LeClaire pushed himself back, propped on pillows with his legs crossed at the ankle, illusion long, and dropped his cigarette butt in an empty Coke can. "So talk."

Damien sat on the edge of the bed, gingerly. He was still wet. "I wanted to talk about, what you did."

"It isn't negotiable, Damien. If you don't like it, leave."

That hit him like an axe in the chest. His goddamn stupid eyes filled up with tears. "  
"You'd just…you won't even _talk_ to me about it? It's just, your way, or-"

"Or no way," LeClaire agreed, and untangled one foot and stretched his leg out crooked and drew a line on Damien's thigh with his bare toes. 

He wanted to push LeClaire's foot away. Instead his fingers wrapped around his ankle, and he said, "Do you want me to leave?"

"I want you, to take off your clothes, and get in this bed, so I can fuck you, so I can sleep." He pulled his foot away, unsnapped and unzipped and peeled off his vinyl pants, threw them, shoved the covers down and slid under them. 

He lay there watching until Damien took off his shirt.

Damien peeled off his jeans and boxers in one go. His mouth was dry, his mind mostly empty. He wondered what Kate was doing, back in another life. Watching TV. Smoking Camels. Putting iodine-red in her hair, without him there to make sure she didn't miss any. 

Who would help him dye his hair, now? 

Kevin, probably. 

Brief, drastic flash of Kev's gloved hands slick with dye pulling through his hair, petting hard against his scalp. It made his teeth hurt. No, wait, that was him grinding them together.

He climbed in, all knees and elbows and hipbones, the sheets dragging at his damp skin. Brian pulled him over, and he ended up with his head on LeClaire's chest, arms sprawled over him. It was always a shock, this. Skin against skin. He always felt, disoriented, as if LeClaire should have been hotter, colder, softer, something. He squirmed his way on top, buried his face in LeClaire's neck. "I don't want you to be mad at me."

A sigh. He pulled Damien up, held him up to look at him. "I don't want to be mad at you. Do what I fucking tell you, next time," he said, and kissed him. 

 

This was instantaneous, an abyss of texture, wet hot tongue and dangerous teeth and lips that were too full even without lipstick. Kissing Kevin had felt like something you did sitting in a Chevelle in your parent's driveway, on a first scared secret date. Kissing LeClaire was like something you did in the corner of a nightclub, driven mad with alcohol and chemicals and percussion and the sex in the air.  
 _  
Can he taste him? On me? Can he?_

_No, but he knows._  
  
Their mouths were sticking together. LeClaire pulled back just enough to speak. "Turn around."

Damien hated this. He was pretty sure LeClaire knew it. But he sat up, moved over onto his side with his head towards Brian's feet and then LeClaire grabbed him around his waist and dragged him close and buried his face against his stomach, pulled him up and bit at his damp tangle of pubic hair, tugging hard with his teeth, biting deeper. He nipped at the flesh underneath, closed his teeth brutally hard on a tiny fold of skin. 

He whimpered, resigned. LeClaire curled up closer so that Damien could reach with his smaller frame. 

He liked sucking LeClaire's dick, or having the favor returned. He just didn't like both at once. It was too much, too hard to coordinate or concentrate. He usually passively resisted this until Brian got tired of his half-assed blowjobbing and switched to something else. He didn't dare to try that now, though. He had to make everything okay again. Even though he couldn't remember why it wasn't. It had been his fault, hadn't it? Some unknown crime. Whatever it was, he had this immediate drive to try as hard as he could, to do this as well as he could manage. 

He leaned into LeClaire's cock, rubbed his face against it. He kept his eyes open for the collage of flesh and texture, trying to wire himself into this reality. Brian was petting him, running his hand from the back of his knee, up across his ass, up to his back. _God, he's so much bigger than me,_ Damien thought. Blur. It felt like falling, this, like peripheral systems were being shut down, one by one. 

LeClaire imitated his nuzzling, laughing, and then licked him with too much awful tongue from base to tip. Damien hated that, more tickle than tingle, but he moaned anyway and pushed closer. LeClaire rewarded him with deep, sudden suction, careful friction of lips and tongue. Instant, agonizing erection. He closed his eyes and drew the dick in front of him as far into his mouth as he could, trying to set up a rhythm that didn't throw LeClaire off. 

It was different this time, the frustration of it a little less acute. A lot of the problem was how hard this angle was hard for him. He had to hold his mouth open as far as he could, set up a complex pattern of relaxing and then tensing his tongue. LeClaire was petting with his fingertips now, over his balls, farther back to threaten him with penetration. It dropped him down another level, and he got too enthusiastic. He felt the head scrape against his molars, and LeClaire growled and pinched the inside of his left thigh _hard._ It hurt enough to make him jump, and he forced his jaw wider, trying to move more carefully, faster. 

He experimented with tonguepressure in different places. Apparently he stumbled onto something, because LeClaire made an insistent, fervent noise, dug his fingernails into Damien's ass, fumbled his sucking for a minute. After a few minutes of this he stopped completely, wrapping his arms around the smaller boy, chewing at his thigh, making an elongated mouth-closed noise that rose and fell. 

Finally he shoved his hips forwards, one snapping motion. His dick drove too far into Damien's throat without warning, setting off some kind of reflex that made him cold and shaky and faint, made a nasty heat unfold at the hinges of his jaw. He put one hand up to resist, but LeClaire drew back, out completely, and put one hand down and closed it hard over his own dick, and came in a long vicious convulsion, on his face, his neck. Damien made a startled, almost horrified protest, but LeClaire's other hand wound merciless in his hair and held him still for this indignity. 

_Do I like this?_ Scary, deformed blur of other horrors he might like. Brief flash of Brian sitting on the edge of a stage, one hand a fist pulled back, the other wrapped casual around a microphone. Eyes nailed to some unknown accuser. Tickertape fast haze of words from advice columns in leather magazines. 

His eyes were scrunched tightly closed. He'd had no idea come was so warm, or that there was so much of it. It was in his eyelashes, splattered on his mouth and cheeks. He put his tongue out to investigate. The taste was as chemical as ever, electric and saltsweetsour and evil, more vivid now that most of it wasn't in the back of his throat. 

He did like it. 

He went limp, raised unresisting hands to pet LeClaire through the rest of his orgasm, feeling like a whore, an object. Property. Perfect.

LeClaire reached down, stroked him hard, squeezing enough to hurt, and he came himself, defeated, in a long mean hot blaze. He was trying to imagine how he looked, lying there like that. 

Silence.

LeClaire moved, still shivering, turned around to lie beside him. Damien felt him touch his face, smearing their semen together, tracing forehead and cheekbones and chin with it. It had gotten in his eyes anyway, burning like seawater. LeClaire pulled him closer, licking the mixture off his, tongue brushing eyelids, nose, bottom lip. He whispered, "Saving you….the calories…" and laughed. 

It took Damien a second to figure out what he meant. Then a long narrow blade of embarrassment and hurt and something else that kept him from moving. No point. 

LeClaire was running his sticky fingers through Damien's hair, scratching his scalp with ragged black nails.

From Max and Kevin's room, a stereo was playing. KMFDM. _Brutalize me, I will heal,_ and all that noise.

It was almost dawn. 

 

The music didn't help, really. He could still hear them through the wall.

Kevin sprawled on his half of the double bed, fingers jammed firmly in his ears. He'd stripped down to his wet jeans, packed a bowl, turned the stereo on too loud. All this failing to keep his mind utterly blank.

Damn it.

He ran a bath and dumped in four teeny hotel shampoo bottles. He sat there, soaking, running more and more hot water in. He had run out of heroin, and he'd made one of his periodic decisions not to buy any more. And it had everything to do with the kid.

I mean, come on, just the, potential of it had occurred to him.

A few times. In the past hour or so.

Damn it.

It was…luminous. This feeling. 

 

It was disguising itself inside him, wrapping itself up tight in a rational veil of some kind of protective urge. This kept the guilt down to a dull roar. This…sensation was eclipsing five or six other things inside him. Panic. Druglust. 

He should have recognized it as a bad sign.

He put his hand to his mouth. Took it away again.

OEDIPUS REGINA

 

Brian was a long sleeping oblong. The hotel room was dark, except for a candle burning in the ice bucket on top of the television. Damien was facing LeClaire's back, chewing his fingers, afraid to wake him up.

Sleeping was completely out of the question. The guilt was everywhere, sprinkled liberally with a weird fear that felt like being a kid upstairs when your parents were fighting downstairs. 

LeClaire had never been angry at him before, had never hit him, not like that. He must have disappointed him. A lot.

He couldn't sleep.

The guilt was everywhere.

He stopped chewing his fingers, pulled one of the stiff locks of hair from the black side (the blue side made his teeth blue) and chewed on it. Semen. He gritted it between his front teeth, lightly, frustrated. His other hand came up, and he brushed his fingers from Brian's shoulder to his thigh. Nothing. He closed his hand around LeClaire's upper arm.

He woke up, one long electricity suddenly occupying that evil skin, and turned over on his back. He made a sound like a tomcat stretching, but dropped a few octaves into a bass-guitar timbre. "What do you want, woman?" he murmured, and reached up almost before Damien could stop chewing his hair. Almost caught. He groped over in the darkness, hand wandering from Damien's throat to his chest, fingertips searching for his nipple. 

"I'm sorry I lied to you," he said, words all run together, trying to ignore LeClaire's hand.

"Are you." No particular tone of voice.

God, he hated when Brian did that.

"I can't stop thinking about it." He ran through that again, and closed his eyes and said "I want you to make me….regret it."

The second he'd finished speaking Damien thought, _what is the matter with you!?_ and waited, horrified at himself.

Silence. Too much silence. Brian's breathing, unchanged, and the dull hum of the air conditioner. 

Brian moved, one slow coil, and settled down on top of Damien, one knee nudging hard between his thighs. He did a slow, deliberate shiver, wrapping his arms tight. Lean, predator velvet. "Tonight."

"Tonight?" Vertigo, then Damien looked at the yellow threatening to spill through the vertical blinds. It was morning. "But the show--"

"Tonight, I'll make you regret it," LeClaire told him, and pinned him close, and kept him trapped that way until they both fell asleep.

ABSOLUTION

They were on the bus again. Destination, Gainesville.

Kev and Max had to ball themselves up small to fit curled up together on Max's bunk. Max pulled the weird elongated curtain, ignoring the obligatory catcalls. He squirmed around, knees and elbows flailing, until their heads were at whispering distance. Kev was lying on his back with his knees hugged close to his chest.

"What happened?" Funny Max. Every time he tried to whisper, he sounded like he wanted to be Bogart. 

"I did, something awful."

"Like, jail awful?"

Well, yes, but that wasn't the thing that was currently keeping him awake at night. "Like, LeClaire can NOT know, awful."

Max instantly drew the wrong conclusion, since what had happened Last Time Brian Found Out had been one of the most traumatic events of his weird life, and he had only been a spectator. "And this isn't, about, you know--"

" _No,_ " he said. That fast. Solar flare of guilt, and a blush to match it. It was dim enough in the bunk to make everything navy blue, too dim for Max to see him. "I…Damien, I"

"You _didn't."_

"I kissed him," Kev said, to knock out that wrong conclusion before Max decided to discuss it.

This dropped Max from visualizing a XXX sin to visualizing a PG-13 one, but he was still plenty horrified. "No!" he said, forgetting to whisper. Three more yell/catcall/whistles from the peanut gallery scattered in the rest of the bus.

Kev shushed him, gave him a clumsy feeble smack with the back of one hand. 

"No," Max said again, whispering this time. "A real kiss? With tongue?"

_God help me, my only confidante is a drag queen with the mentality of a fourth-grader._ "No. Without tongue."

"But on the mouth, right?"

Kev sighed, eyes dying to roll. He could see where this was just destined to go, and he decided to spare himself the warmer/colder discussion. "This kind of kiss, all right?" He squirmed over closer, both their heads at neckbreaking angles, and tried to duplicate the kiss he had given Damien. Max's mouth was warm, loose, with lipstick that tasted like kindergarten. Max giggled, but submitted to this indignity. 

Kev had kissed Max before, due to drunkenness, New Years, spin the bottle. He loved him in this exasperated older-brother way, so the kiss wasn't unpleasant, or awkward, or anything, but it gave him no tingles of any kind. 

_Great. So that was all Damien._

He moved back. Max was quiet, which meant he was analyzing. Kev could almost make out his expression: quizzical, mouth crumpled, painted eyebrows crooked. Max came up with, "That long? And gentle, like that?" 

_Except that I had my hand on the back of his neck, and he'd been crying, and…_ "Yeah, um. Mostly like that."

The word neither of them used, or considered using, was _tenderness._

"Oh man. Not good," Kev could feel Max shaking his head. "Were you drunk, or…"

"It wasn't….that kind of a thing."

Max made hmming noises about that for a second or two. Then, "Who, um, started it?"

"….I did."

That confirmed Max's suspicion. "Man, you better not do it again. Or anything, man. That little bitch is seriously, taken."

"I'm not going to do it--" _Again. Or anything else._

He stopped. Laced his fingers together, pulled his knees up until they were touching his collarbone. 

More slight moving of the mattress that meant head-shaking. "Was he mad?"

"No. He left. He…no. He wasn't mad."

"Would he rat you out?"

"No." A pause. "No."


	8. Chapter 8

SYNESTHESIA

LeClaire kept his promise to make Damien eat. 

They'd been at some godawful place….a truck stop, maybe, who knew….and he'd been dragged from the bus, blinking and dazed, steered into a booth between Brian and Tristan. Brian had ordered for him, a scary plethora of bacon and eggs and toast and ham over fried potatoes. He'd eaten, as much as he could stand to, letting the others talk over him. 

Kev kept his eyes away from this spectacle. He was sitting across from Damien, cutting up something for the hopelessly sleepy Max, who was dozing on Kincaid's shoulder.   
Didn't matter. Herded back into the bus, smoking, talking, the new city unfolding around them, an ugly scattered grid of numbered streets and college kids in Abercrombie crowding rundown sidewalks.

Damien sat in the L-shaped breakfast nook, with his battered Ibanez across his knees. He'd bummed a heavy bass pick from Max and was toying with a heavy dark intro that was secretly an alternate opening for Biofuck. LeClaire folded himself in beside him, and leaned in kissing close until he caught his eyes. "Come on."

He didn't wait, or explain. He stood up and stalked down the aisle towards the back. 

Damien followed him. 

Of course he did. 

Professional ego wrangler. 

He passed Kev sitting by Max, and handed off his guitar, the strap catching his hair and pushing blue wisps into his eyes. Kev took it with the ease of familiarity, and started playing "Gimme Shelter" very quietly.

LeClaire led him into the weird bathroom/shower. When they were wedged inside he shoved the narrow door closed. He pulled Damien facing him and picked him up--Damien gasped, hands snapping tense, expecting--and LeClaire sat him down hard on the almost-nonexistent counter by the sink. The faucet was digging into his back. "Don't move."

He reached into the shower, and pulled out a red plastic makeup case.

 

EX NIHILO

Some artistic soul had darkened the arena for them, with colored lights jittering out gyroscopes of red and emerald and gold. Either that, or some stoner had left everything running. It was freezing cold inside, with enough cigarette and marijuana and clove smoke drifting in thick patches to interact with the light show. 

It was almost below sixty degrees, cold for Florida, and in honor of this imitation winter LeClaire was wearing a jacket Damien had never seen before. A long sleek patent-leather trenchcoat, cut in long even vertical strips from hem to shoulder, with each of these long slashes pinned closed again with a stitchwork of safety pins. The collar and sleeve cuffs had been trimmed with long elegant white feathers. He wore leather gloves with no lining that tied at the wrists and one ring, a huge inverted crucifix, with exaggerated gothic lines and set with gleaming crimson glass on his left pinky. His eyes were painted in drastic black, skin flawless white, mouth whited over too, and then painted in with ghostpale frosted pink lipstick. 

He was monumental, mythological, unshakable. He had been distant to Damien all morning, expecting him to follow, guiding him left or right sometimes towards seats or doorways with light careless nudges of his gloved hands. He was being a bastard. He knew it.

 

EQUILATERAL

Backstage in the lounge, Max brought Damien a confused heap of clothing, deposited the entire armload into his lap, beamed, and wandered off. 

LeClaire ignored his questioning look. He was talking about something with Tristan and cutting lines with a gleaming new credit card on somebody's laptop. 

He figured out where the actual dressing room was, went in, and dumped the clothes onto a chair. Two heavy leather bracelets with d-rings set in them slid out of the pile and hit the floor. Jesus. There was a Bauhaus shirt, with the hem cut off, and the collar neatly snipped out generously enough to make sure the neckline would slip over his shoulder. He pulled off his Spiderman shirt and after debating briefly, went ahead and put the new one on over the fishnet shirt he had underneath. 

Next was brand-new black bondage cargo shorts. Drool. He'd wanted a pair like this forever. These were insanely heavy when he picked them up, and he checked the pockets. Collar to match the bracelets. The same fuck-me-red lipstick LeClaire had put on him on the bus, and black liquid eyeliner. Apparently he was supposed to touch up his makeup, too. 

The weight turned out to be three feet or so of industrial-grade chain. He put on everything else, quickly. People kept coming in and out--Kincaid, Fathom, Kev briefly--and it made him nervous, even though the least he ended up wearing was black boxers Kev had donated to him. 

He had no idea what to do with the chain. Finally he stuffed it back into the pocket, on the opposite side from his wallet and chains. It was still way too damn heavy. Only the belt snagging on his hipbone stopped it from dragging his shorts down. He had a brief pang of……what? anger? sadness? Soon his hip wouldn't be such a blade. 

Still. Anything for LeClaire. 

The bracelets were too large for his wrists. They were floppy and loose enough to spin around even buckled through the last hole. The collar fit, second-to-last hole, with two fingers inside it. He vaguely remembered reading that was how to wear it someplace, though it probably applied to dogs or something. He checked himself in the mirror. Um, yeah. The lipstick was….just _so_ red, luminous and really overtly sexual. He was kind of, embarrassed by it, but it did look good. Slutty, but good. The collar was awful, though. He was superconscious of it, every time he moved his head. 

Back out in the lounge, LeClaire gestured him closer. He tugged Damien forward by the waistband of his shorts, reached into the pocket, and pulled out the chain. Then he reached into his own pocket, and pulled out four tiny silver padlocks, and a ring with one key. 

Awful. 

One at the back of the collar, one in the front for the chain, and one on each manacle. Damien stood, letting Brian move his arms, his hair, tilt his head. He wanted to, move. Complain. Something. But he didn't. Not really. Mostly, he wanted to see what would happen next. 

The bracelets were too loose to be acceptable, and Brian took these off and poked a new hole in each one with a corkscrew scavenged from a champagne tray. Better. He smoothed his hands once over Damien's hair, and said, "That's very, very, rock and roll, and you look…..great."

STRING

Damien stood behind the vast speaker at stage right, painted and nervous. The rest of the band was ready, the lights were all but gone, and Kevin was a shadow that might have been looking in his direction. The shadow flickered, hand moving invisibly to fretboard, and an E-minor like nuclear thunder shook him from his teeth to his ankles. His hands came up, wanting to cover his ears, but he stopped them for the sake of his hair. Max did a tricky voodoo bassline, and then all at once the lights blazed on, hailed by Fathom's merciless slamming across the drum kit. It was more deafening than the music, flooding the entire stage in a blinding surgical white glow. 

In the center of this mayhem Brian was holding the mic stand out with his right arm, motionless and stunning. Tonight it was midnight blue vinyl pants as tight as a tattoo with a wide heavy belt, a shirt that was a network of straps and chrome buckles with fishnet tatters underneath, and platform boots that must have brought him up to around seven feet tall. He looked like a defiance of physics.

After a few minutes, he settled into that warm Zen state that was his favorite thing about watching the show. There was nothing inside him but this music and this eyecandy. 

 

Kevin thought this show was going even better than the first. No nasty feedback screaming away at random intervals. There was still the barrage of objects from the audience, but the ratio was slanted in favor of underwear and weird harmless shit like condoms and papers with notes scrawled on them.

LeClaire encouraged this, standing front and center, slamming himself in the chest, to prove how invulnerable he was. He baited people into scavenging through pockets and working up spit, twitching in exaggerated ecstasy when anyone scored a direct hit. 

A boy with light blue hair and religiously wild eyes, supported by two dyed and pinned cohorts leaned way over the barricade, brandishing a handful of flowers. He was wavering, but keeping his balance, and begging prettily by stroking his own face and making ludicrous eyes. 

This was more than LeClaire's ego would let him resist. He spent several minutes in a messy crouch, vinyl knees bent almost to his chin, microphone tilting in and out, darting his head in like a bird and snatching mouthfuls of the bouquet between lines and spitting them back at his admirer. Finally there was nothing but a crooked bundle of stems. He rewarded this sacrifice by sucking on his fingers, wetting them generously, then leaning over and shoving them deep into anime boy's mouth.

Kevin watched, amused and quietly jealous. Their eyes were nailed together, this temporary intimacy magnified by light and crowd and music into something as sticky as sex. The boy's throat was working, cheeks and jaw tensing until LeClaire tired of it and shoved with the heel of his hand against the kid's chin, hard enough to topple the pyramid. 

_(god damn him, damn him, damn him, i love him still and there's no hope at all, can love metastasize, like cancer, can it)_

A brief scuffle of boys and girls, swarming the bluehaired kid for second-hand contact. LeClaire had been doing shit like that since they were a garage-and-bender-party band. Since

_(before the hospital thing)_

they had been little more than kids themselves. 

Dammit. He watched LeClaire's eat up the stage in wide crooked strides, cutting across to stage right as if he could care less what had happened to this flower boy. 

Kev placed a mental bet in spite of himself. 

Yep. There. 

LeClaire turned around, body pointed at Max, mic flawlessly poised, sobbing about _retrograde, degrade you like a sex grenade,_ but those predator eyes were searching for skyblue hair. Kevin, 1, Kevin, 0. And bet number two, and yep, there it was: those Fuhrer eyes found what they wanted, making sure the owner of that dyejob was upright and still more or less okay, and wandered away, no longer interested. 

_He only wants to hurt people on purpose, in controlled and specific, ways…._

Kevin noticed he was getting his own share of stares, his own little ration of hands extended to close the space between himself and the crowd. He looked again--normally he played while staring at an invisible point about ten feet in front of himself--and yes, they were actually reaching for him. For _him._

_Like I'm a drug, or something._

Guilt. He was no kind of drug. He was baking powder in a bag that had once held a peanut butter sandwich. LeClaire was diamond dust bright Colombian cocaine in an antique silver pillbox. 

_When Damien was one of them, he--_

He clamped down on that thought, hard, but it morphed itself into something that almost made him step forward, ready to grab a mouthful of something himself. For one brief instant he was almost certain he would do it, could almost feel, someone….blur of ideas, of hair that he was pretty sure would be dyed black, mostly black, and maybe jawline short, like--

_(his)_

The usual not-that-kind-of-guy thing stopped him. He was nowhere near ready to play grabbing and licking games with strange teenagers. He'd leave that rockstar stuff to LeClaire for now. 

_Forever, probably,_ he thought, and decided his ten-foot invisible mark was still a pretty good idea. 

There was at least one hot, shameful, dark-chocolate side effect of letting Brian have the limelight. Now,

_(as if you could take it from him, you stupid little fuck?)_

the eye candy was free. Finally, once and for all, he could stare all he wanted. Without sunglasses. Everyone would just think he was watching for, cues, or something. 

Of course, the fact that he could stare all he wanted meant that he _would_ stare all he wanted. At LeClaire. At LeClaire being a twitchy, package-stroking, arrogant show off in full goth regalia.

He was pretty glad he'd always been a low-slung Ramones type of guitarist.

In a weird sort of way, the whole thing made him feel left out. He had to keep some kind of brain activity going, fretting and strumming and occasionally singing. The kids in the pit had no such constraints. They could stand there blitzed and shrieking. They could squirm their arms inside their clothes and pull them out again, hands full of torn-off underwear. They could space, twitching and glazed, utterly hypnotized by LeClaire's vinyl-upholstered package, lean sobbing against the barricade, gaze up into the bank of lights as though the sequence was an encoded message. They could just, be rocked. 

Funny, when he'd been on the other side he'd felt left out, too--like the next row up was where it was really at. Later, when his paychecks (and his dicksucking ability) had granted him entrance into the hallowed front rows, and a backstage pass or two, it had been ON the stage, guitar strap cutting into his shoulder, fret hand blurring, that had been the epitome of made-it, got-it, there. Now he _was_ there, leather and paint and all, and all he really wanted was to be back in the pit again, even in the shitty seats, so he could just gape at LeClaire's fury without trying to keep rhythm at the same damn time. 

Fuck. He'd been Zen-playing and the song was over. His mind was terrifyingly blank for a beat too long, but thank god, his hand pulled his fingers to the right place, and the fingers agreed on what to do once they got there. _Almost over,_ he thought. It made him feel ungrateful as hell, but he was sort of glad. He was dead tired, and had a serious desire to sneak into his last little emergency bit of H--not enough for one shot, really--and then get nice and drunk. Maybe then, do something utterly un-rockstar. Play Doom with Tris or Max, maybe. Preferably while listening to something totally uncool.

He zigged left to check his high E in his monitor, and saw someone standing just offstage, someone so beautiful it crippled his hand so that a string plunked instead of wailing. Then the angel tossed his head, the gesture bafflingly familiar. Damien. Damien, painted within an inch of his life for 

_(leclaire)_

some reason. 

He did the overexaggerated nod that was the closest to waving you could do with both hands full of six-string. Damien's eyes widened, and he shook his head, mouthing something, and stepped back, hands coming up in the universal gesture for _don't._

_What the hell--_

A sick, heavy, kicked-in-the-balls feeling drifted up around his stomach, deleting his erection. He knew, before he saw LeClaire cutting over like a shark through still water. Something bad was currently in progress.

ATTRITION

LeClaire turned, looking very……deliberate, as if something had cued him to do this, now. 

Damien faltered, then…..smiled, in spite of himself, delighted to be noticed.

LeClaire did not smile back. 

He thought, _shit,_ and stepped back, but it was too late. LeClaire was targeting, and closing in.

_He can't just LEAVE in the middle of a song, he'll be…..fired, or something…._

LeClaire was actually offstage, now, and still moving closer. And he was moving _fast._ Damien took one more baby step back, eyes teacup round, and started to say _oh my god._

It was too late. 

LeClaire grabbed his leash and lunged back towards the stage. Damien went over immediately, thrown forward hard enough to give his knees and palms a serious bang into the concrete floor. The inexorable drag around his neck didn't even leave him time to get to his feet. He had to crawl after Brian as fast as he could.

He discovered he was terrible at fast crawling. Twenty feet, maybe thirty, and multiple knee and elbow bangs later, he was crouched shaking in the middle of the intersection of four floodlights, with ten thousand pairs of fascinated eyes on him. He had never, ever, in his life, felt so shockingly _visible._

Oh, the noise. 

Everything was overcome by the boiling, relentless noise. 

The world stopped moving. There was only the noise, and the supernova of lights, and Brian standing over him with the chain wrapped twice around his hand, like a statue. There was only that for days.

_God, I am so afraid of him, god, I can't be out here in front of, everyone, god, I can't be, this….not on the STAGE, for chrissakes…_

Damien pushed himself up onto his knees, raising one hand, "Don't--"

Brian raised his free hand, made one diagonal in the air, and if there had been noise before, this was some kind of catastrophe. 

Fathom fell in, propeller fast, drilling out a drum line that left Kevin no choice but to crunch out a rhythm again in, grinding ugly and messy in dropped D, playing like he wanted to hurt the guitar somehow, and Casey and Max followed.

Then there were six minutes of hell. 

Brian jerked down and forward on the chain hard, before Damien had even considered anything drastic like standing. He was busy mostly thinking _ow._ The collar hit the back of his neck like a fist and he struck the stage again, face first this time, because both hands had gone to the collar in some kind of reflex. 

The band stayed the hell out of the way. They were playing hard and heavy, with Kev improvising a quick nasty melody around the driving percussion. The floodlights clicked off, then, and there was only a bank of merciless strobe lights, crashing from darkness to a flash like artillery at breakneck speed. Snapshots of everything, and all of them a blur. 

LeClaire dragged him up again, stepping back with illusion long legs, _laughing,_ and then he moved forward and stepped on the chain, hooking it just in front of the heel of one awful platform boot, and he dragged it through, pinning Damien cheek to stage, holding him there, the chain drawn tight. A randomized rack of blacklights shimmered into the chaos, painting everything violet and green. Max was making his bass do things like plane crashes. 

Damien couldn't move. He was bleeding from chin and knee now, too afraid and generally blown away to do much but kind of squirm, gasping. And did he _like_ this? His brain denied it, but his cock knew better, a throbbing aching blaze of like. Another bruise.

The audience loved it. Screaming, slamming, pogoing, hysteria, shouting.

Brian waited, drawing all this adoration in. After a viciously long time he nudged his foot into Damien's head until he looked up, and reached for the buckle of his belt. 

And Damien freaked. He knew, he just knew, that this was not the prologue to a mouthful of dick. It was something in Brian's eyes, maybe, something, familiar. 

This was not cool, this was not sexy, this was not what he meant by rock and roll. No way. A belt was too much, a belt was too weird, a belt was his dad and lying under the kitchen table with the forest of chairlegs that kept him safe being dragged away one, by, one, and crying, a belt was, just no, oh no. 

He freaked. He made a genuine and no longer fucking around effort to get up, away, anything. It didn't help. The chain did not move. And Brian unbuckled his belt with one hand, one tug and slip and then he had the buckle in his hand and he was winding it around his palm, so he wouldn't hit him with the buckle, that much was a mercy, wow, that was a lot more considerate than his dad had ever been, his dad, who had once hit him in the spine with a college dictionary. And seriously, was he _watching_ this happen to himself in front of thousands of people? 

One slow, mean pull, and the belt cleared the loops and hung free. Two and feet of evil. Strobelights again, suddenly. Snapshots of him doing this like the film had gone wrong. 

_(tonight)_

LeClaire looked at the audience, waiting. Raised the belt, giving Damien all kinds of trauma, only to gesture a question at the crowd with it. 

_(i'll make you regret it)_

Thousands of people said yes. 

Five, maybe seven seconds of crowd noise, and that was it. That was all the warning he got. Then LeClaire pulled back the belt and swung it, and he knew damn well what he was doing. It thudded down and left a terrifying line of _pressure_ from Damien's shoulderblade across to his lower back. He felt his shoulderblades snap up, still more startled than hurt, but in so much _dread_ of the next one, falling. It was so _heavy._ And he'd thought the screaming maelstrom of kids was loud. This was _loud._

There was another crack, and he heard it before he felt it, and this one _hurt._ He still couldn't lift his head. The collar would choke him. 

He pulled his knees under him, still thinking maybe he could just stand up, which could lead to, you know, running. This really didn't help. It just altered his position, badly, and then the belt wrapped around the back of his left thigh.

_It can't be that loud, I can hear it over the band, it really, just, can't be that loud…owww, fuck……._

Too much. Too fast. Too many crooked rows of waspstings across his shoulders and the small of his back, wrapping around his ribcage to his chest. 

_(you have to be quiet. do you want the neighbors to hear you? do you?)_

He tried to inhale, thinking _If he hits me one more time, I'll scream._ And it never stopped, and he didn't scream. 

But he was getting there. 

He felt his lungs vibrate, his throat move. One sound, maybe. He couldn't hear himself. He felt it again, the vibration of a moan or a cry, but it was in a void. Another breath. Still no screaming. 

The band dropped the volume, spiraling into a deep loop of an interlude. The hitting stopped. Damien twisted his head to look up. LeClaire was gesturing to someone offstage, the belt still swinging from right hand, the leash held casually in his left, chain wrapped twice around his palm. And someone brought him his microphone, and put it in his waiting hand with the belt. 

Damien really had no, tactical, plan, anymore. 

_Wicked, cheating, trick, that,_ he thought.

He closed his eyes. Whatever LeClaire said to him now would be heard by several thousand people, and he was pretty sure it would be traumatic enough without watching him say it. Except the devil made him open his eyes at the last minute, and he watched this mouth he'd had memorized for years, and

LeClaire said, "Get your arms behind your back."

Um. Okay. Sure. Yeah. 

Apparently, he didn't move fast enough. The belt slammed down across the back of his neck, right above the collar, and the end swung around and got him in the jaw. His arms drew themselves up, his hands behind him. He was afraid   
Brian would hit his hands. His left hand. His chording hand. _Trust,_ he thought, and it didn't mean anything. 

It took him forever to realize there wasn't another one coming. 

He twisted his face towards the stage and pressed his forehead against it, making some kind of tiny, invisible little short sound, over and over, with his mouth pressed tightly closed. He felt like he was on a turntable, held down by centrifugal force. He felt like he might fall, even though he couldn't get any closer to the ground than he already was. 

"Don't move." Terrible. So very Emperor Ming and all that, through all those yards and yards of speakers. He didn't move.

Brian was doing something over him that he couldn't see. It made the audience roar. _I won't look._

The chain went limp. Dropped. It was lying right there on the floor above his head. He was free now, but something held his forehead tight against the stage anyway. He had been told not to move, and he wouldn't. You didn't antagonize Him. It would only make it worse. There was much worse than the belt; there were fists and wristlocks and broken fingers and fire escapes to 

_(not)_

think about. 

LeClaire tugged at his hands. He lay still, letting himself be moved, heart firehosing blood through him so fast that it felt like pinpricks of red might seep out through his pores. Cold, a weight against his wrist. A click. The padlock. 

_(the key, they were yelling because he held up the KEY)_

And now his arms had been removed from the equation. There was a nasty kind of relief in that; he didn't have to fight himself not to struggle anymore. He could wriggle all he wanted and his hands were staying put. 

Four minutes, and counting.

Brian picked up the leash again, and pulled him towards the very front of the stage, slowly enough to let him shuffle along on his knees. They were maybe four feet from the barricade, now, and the animal crowd behind it was a haze of hands held up by black leather bracelets, fingers spread spider-wide to catch a piece of this atrocity. 

LeClaire dragged him fast again for the last few feet and kind of, slung him and then _kicked_ him, oh my god, kicked him hard in the stomach with one awful boot. An heavy sphere of vacuum just under his ribcage, a terrible sensation of being emptied, and then the burning struggle to pull his breath in again, the vacuum filling with dark red blunt-edged pain. He huddled shaking, wrapped around this ball of hurt, thrown up against LeClaire's monitor with the metal-plated corner digging into his cheek.

He thought, _i, love….._

The sea of hands was boiling, now, and the longest arms were only just able to brush at him, myriad insect-tiny tugs at his legs, his null-and-void hands, his shoulder. Someone caught a wisp of his hair, tangled it in sweat-sticky fingers and pulled hard, stealing a thin mesh of blue and black strands. He lifted his head and saw a girl with chemicalwhite short hair, staring at this prize snarled in her rings, and then back at him, looking--sorry? horrified? grateful? And then she was gone, shoved aside and back and down, who knew.

One minute, thirty seconds. 

He looked up, over his shoulder. One battery-acid inhale. Brian slid his hand around the microphone and leaned into it, looking down through all that hair like a demon. "Do you regret it?"

Not fast enough. Brian pulled the leash down until Damien was on his back over the monitor, arms trapped under him and shoulders wailing. He slid his foot along the chain until it was pressed against Damien's throat. 

Behind them, Kev missed his fingering completely, hitting an atmospherically wrong chord and catching himself badly. Nobody noticed. 

Damien was trying to push himself up, somehow, hips raised off the floor, bootheels slipping. Anything to relieve the pressure on his throat. His spine was bent back hard over the corner of the speaker, and LeClaire's boot was pushing the collar in so hard he could actually _feel_ his windpipe compressing. Black batshapes folded in at the edges of his vision, exploding into magenta flares. He said _yes yes yes i regret it i do,_ breath jagged and voicebox wounded, and the noise swallowed it up. Nobody heard it. 

But LeClaire saw his lips move, and smiled. 

The pull of the collar and the shove of his boot was like a vise. He leaned over, and said into the mic "I can't hear you. Can any of you hear him?"

Roars of _no._

He held the mic down for Damien to speak. He still had the belt in that hand and it fell against Damien's face, horrifying, as though it were venomous, sentient. 

_oh god i can't, not into the, not so that everyone can….._

_……no way out, get it over with, don't make it worse,_

_there are worse things_

"……yes, I regret it," he said, as slowly and clearly as he could. 

Cataclysmic. He'd expected, some kind of delay, but his words were right there, everywhere, thrown back at him from miles of speakers, his voice weird and huge and fragile and ragged and petrified, over a kaleidoscope of percussion and power chords. _Some stage debut,_ part of him thought. 

Explosion of applause, stomping, chanting of something. More? Whore? 

LeClaire pulled back the belt again, and drove it down, twice. Both landed across his ribcage, one just above his nipples, one below, and if that wasn't as hard as he could swing, Damien never wanted to know it. The microphone picked up the impact, two dull bassdrum thuds, and the trailing edge of the one stuttered cry Damien made. Then he threw down the belt and the mic--bang, smash--and let go of the chain and pulled his foot off Damien's neck. He looked down, tugged at the waistband of his pants, belt loops pointedly empty, erection blatant. Damien's brain took a helpless Polaroid of that. LeClaire statued at him, all mouth and arrogance. He decided something, then turned his back and walked away. 

On the way by Max he hooked the backup mic and said "Get this bitch off my stage."

Zero minutes, zero seconds.

Well. 

 

CASUALTY

It took Damien a long time to realize it was over, and to remember how to move. He tried to sit up and succeeded in sliding over the monitor, scraping most of his spine on the edge. 

Somebody did the half-crouching weaving run to him from offstage. He looked up, squinting. Security, Judecca Tree. Whatever. 

He managed kneeling, then standing, and took two lurching steps on knees that felt sprung and full of glass. The guy took him by the arm, then the shoulders, and he shuffled and staggered until he finally made it backstage. The three little steps-down nearly killed him, and he almost toppled them both. 

It was so dark after the stage lights that all he could see was a blueviolet haze with shapes hurrying through it. He couldn't hear. This was weird, creepy, like something out of a war movie, and he looked up and tried to straighten, realized again that his arms were still padlocked together behind his back. 

The afterburn of the lights was fading into dark blue ghostcircles. One of Judecca Tree's roadies--his favorite--had replaced the embarrassed security guard at his elbow. Jason (Jay? James?) was gesturing in front of him, eyebrows raised under his eternal ski cap. Something about the manacles. Damien didn't get it. He shook his head. The kid went around behind him, still talking and gesturing like a mime or a TV on mute, and kind of started trying to catch Damien's wrists, hesitant. Like Damien might, Bruce Lee kick him, or something. Or freak. 

Oh. He wanted to unbuckle them. _No._ LeClaire had locked his wrists together, and only LeClaire would unlock them. It made his scrotum crawl just _thinking_ about what Brian might do if he came back here and found him with his hands free. Damien pulled away, shaking his head again, and yelled "No thank you!" because he still couldn't hear himself at all. 

The kid made drinking motions, and that got him an quick and serious nod. _Yes, fine, coolness. Bring me something if you have to, whatever. Just go away, god, please._

The kid vanished. 

He walked in what he was pretty sure was the direction of the lounge. The walls were painted public-school green over public-school cinderblocks, covered in Sharpie and paint and makeup graffiti from a thousand bands. He leaned his shoulder against this because he couldn't trail his hand along it. Friction-y drag of chipped paint and concrete trying to grab his tshirt. 

People were walking past him in either direction. Lots of them stopped to talk to him, or try to. A few of them touched his shoulder, worried, seeing blood on his chin, his knees. He persisted in walking, ignoring them, nodding a little and muttering _thanks, i'm fine._ Finally he hit the doorway of the green room and turned right. He wanted to shut the door, and it took him a minute of pointless trying with his foot before he gave up, backed into it, and patted around for the doorknob with his hand to pull it closed. He ignored the staring, but it made his throat hurt. Dammit. An entire goddamned concert hall had just seen worse, what did he care if a couple of roadies saw this now? 

Sluggish, draggy steps to the couch, then he kind of thumped over onto his side. He wasn't waiting for his drink.

Serious hurting: stomach, collarbone, back of left knee, a wide swatch directly up his spine. Little familiar jellyfish-trails of sting all over his back and thighs and chest. His shoulders were killing him; he could almost feel them trying to just pop out of the sockets and be done with it. Also, his nervous breakdown meter was in the red. His arms were shaking so hard that he scooted closer to the back of the couch to keep the padlock from rattling in the D-rings. He was cold, after the drenching heat of the stage. He had no idea where Kate's jacket was, but he wanted it badly, right this minute, even if he couldn't put it on.

The crying was kind of a delayed reaction. There wasn't a whole lot of it. Just tears for maybe half a second, no sobbing or anything. He was too drained to make a production number out of it. He wished he could wrap his arms around his knees. That would've been better. The humiliation seemed to be a permanent fixture, rising and falling like a new kind of nausea, in bloodred waves that made him dizzy and sick of himself. All those eyes. 

The door opened.

He thought _please godletitbe kevin and not Him…_

LeClaire stepped inside, and closed the door behind him.

 

LUPERCALIA

He went over to Damien and stood there, hands in his hair pulling it out of his face, looking down with this criminally sexy disdain. Damien closed his eyes, then opened them again, thinking _he wants me to look at him._ Six foot four of vinyl and skin, gleaming. The straps and shirt were gone. Long wireline snaking down along sternum and stomach, barred by cord necklace at LeClaire's throat, by the oilspill pants hanging still-beltless at his hips, stretched into tight contour lines over his dick. 

_I want…..this is…..dreaming, a game, a joke…….I want……._

Brian leaned over, put his hand on the back of the couch, and his hair swung forward, dripping sweat and Evian, dragging a tentacle-damp line from Damien's neck above the collar to his face. Nothing. Then he reached down and pulled at Damien to sit up, and wrapped his arms around him and closed his hands around the shackles behind him. Not exactly an embrace. 

_…..him to bite me so i can bite him back, claw me so i can bleed, slam my head into a wall so i get a blue flash and then blackness and then a hospital where i can lie to the doctors……this….is…an earthquake….._

One hard ruthless bonegrating squeeze, and then LeClaire's hands came up and bent Damien's head so he could lick his cheek, his neck, his ear, just under his eye. His chin, finally, the narrow crooked streak of blood, there, stopping short of a kiss, as if it had been only the blood he wanted. Harsh, arrhythmic breathing against Damien's face.

Damien wailed, a tiny terrornoise, half-expecting to be bitten, as though LeClaire might fold into a wolf at any moment. He pressed his face into the skin of Brian's chest, smelling salt and boy and rage and said "Don't put me out there please oh please don't put me out there I won't do it again, I won't, please Brian I love you, don't…"

He had never said that before. 

Nothing changed. 

Close-up blur of Brian's hand, unsnapping, unzipping. He grasped Damien's bottom lip, fingernails digging in for one flash of sting, and drew a crimson lipstick smear down his chin, pulling his head down. "Get me wet."

Damien had to tug LeClaire's pants open with his teeth. Delirious, the question of how he might look, doing this. He drew in a deep, greedy breath. Cheerleader-candy-apple scent again. All at once he realized it was conditioner. 

Vicious quicktime: LeClaire in the shower, slick and wet and alone with his eyes closed, raking a generous handful of something slick and expensive into that evil hair, then reaching down and smearing what was left into his pubic hair. 

God.

Seconds or hours, neither of them moving, the head of LeClaire's dick pressed against his clenched teeth. He wanted to, needed to open his mouth, but something like electricity was quivering all through him and every muscle he had was knitted tight, vibrating, aching. Then he let go of whatever it was, and opened his mouth, and the cock slid in, slick and swollen over his tongue. LeClaire was pulling him back by his hair. Warm tangle of pain in his scalp. He made some protest, the appetite in him wanting throat and mouth bruised and filled, and he sucked hard, and LeClaire yanked his head away, furious, and hit him backhand, sending him toppling against the back of the couch. It made him cry for a second, suddenly. It hurt his…..feelings? 

Brian had misunderstood, he hadn't meant to…

No, _Damien_ had misunderstood. 

This wasn't about his appetite, really. Only about the places where his desires and LeClaire's happened to overlap.

LeClaire pulled Damien up, swung him around in a lazy arc and let him go at the end of it. He staggered and fell into a rolling rack of costumes, mostly painless except that a piece of the frame at the bottom caught him across his shins. It threw him forward, facefirst, into a dense dark world of cotton and leather and feathers and fur. He drew in one breath, so deep his stomach fought it. Smells of sweat and paint and deodorant and cigarettes and marijuana and

_(kevin)_

and LeClaire. 

A blue leather opera trench cascaded down, burying him in its weight, in that dark religious scent. He was lying on his face, ribcage against the crossbar, adding new bruises to his collection, stirring the tangle of fabric with his feet. 

Brian came down hard on his back, and he _growled,_ and Damien could feel him breathing in rapid angry bursts, exhaling hot and fast against his neck, his shoulder. He was all elbows and ribcage and hair and vinyl. 

_This is lust, this fury._ The phrase rattled into his head and pulled a switch inside him and locked it down, and he was one vivid arc of desire, pushing back against his attacker, wanting. LeClaire forced his hands up farther, and he screamed, one bright runner of torture pulling through his left shoulder. Then there was only LeClaire's hands, weighted with rings, nails ragged, fingers swarming everywhere, hooking tight and angry and leaving gouges in their wake. 

He felt his shorts and chains and straps and boxers, ripped down and added to the general tangle. He kicked, something, trying pointlessly to get this knot of fabric over his booted feet. This was interpreted as resistance, apparently. LeClaire snarled. Shadow of a wolf, again. More hitting, fistheavy thudding blows. Back, back, right hip, right thigh, each blow a little explosion of confusing pleasure.

He'd had a fantasy, a wet dream, a pet jerk-off movie he'd stored in his head for years, probably lifted from samurai legend with weird Roman trappings added from some Bible movie. There would be some kind of vague, fight, and he would be beaten down and conquered on a battlefield, pushed down on all fours and 

_(raped)_

fucked, by someone beautiful and bloody, with armor digging into his back. All that stored and cherished blaze rose up in him now, and he slammed himself back so hard he almost threw LeClaire off him, and said in one thin plastic rush, "….. _now_ ….."

There had never been anything, so, vivid. His own dick was jammed against something jagged with sequins, and LeClaire hit him again, his hand spread flat, fingers wide, and then spread him open with his thumbs and drove himself inside in a blunt, mean sequence. All the nasty, gorgeous, frictionsick itch and sting and sense of fullness and invasion and the low stomachdeep clench of pleasure, compacted into seconds. It was too fucking much, like a strobe light against a migraine, like he imagined it might be in a car crash, like being knocked over by the shockwave of a ten kiloton bomb. 

He didn't get time to scream about it; it went on and on, and LeClaire was still hitting him, lazy messy crazy, sometimes the almost-painless side of his fist, sometimes the knuckles in a short more specific hurt, sometimes the dull sting of his palm, deathmetal fast. Both sensations were one synchronized slam of abuse and delight. He was silent, all higher brain functions crashing, burning, teeth driven into his bottom lip and still grinding tighter, hands gripping blue leather that did nothing to steady him. 

A wolf in armor, long jaws closing over the back of his neck. A centurion in fur with overgrown teeth, bloodslick from chin to navel. And then this confused system failure of fantasy was deleted, too, and all that came to fill the space was LeClaire, LeClaire, LeClaire….and it, it was

_over, it has to be over, it has, to be--_

 

He'd come all over somebody's shirt. LeClaire was still inside him, lying against his back, heavy and wet and soothing. 

He was sleepy. He never wanted to move. LeClaire's cock, doing something weird like, twitching, inside him. Brief reflex hipmovements, from either or both of them, that made him groan in a tired kind of way. Brian opened his mouth against Damien's back, drew a wide lazy circle with his tongue. 

Knocking.

Damien was too tired to wish it was Kevin. Mostly he just wished whoever it was would go away before LeClaire decided to move. He had never in his life felt anything quite like this, this silence inside him, like every little voice in his head had been drowned, gagged, shot.

Muffled, through the door: "Brian? It's important."

Tristan Blade. Brian shoved himself off, pulling out fast enough to leave Damien with that sickening slide-grasping feeling for a second. Damien had a half-second to turn over, all dazed and choppy, and drag an armload of clothes over himself. 

Tristan was already leaning into the room. He spared Damien barely a glance. He was quite rock-star acclimated, and half-naked groupies in various positions were about as amazing and unique as coffee tables. He was stagedecked, and holding a beer. "MTV just saw every bit of that, and the crowd is going nuts. Do you guys have any more?"

Damien spent a full ten seconds thinking this guy meant MTV had seen, _that,_ and it didn't help that LeClaire was as close to speechless as Damien had ever seen him He had his pants mostly up, and more or less fastened, at least. "Any…more, um--"

Behind him, Damien said, "MTV?"  
"Songs!" Tris shouted, laughing. He reached in and clapped LeClaire hard on the shoulder, almost a punch. "An _encore,_ you know, from the band, now get out there, both of you, before they stomp through the motherfucking _floor,_ yeah?"

"Both of us?" Damien tried to stir around in the clothes for his shorts without looking away from Brian and Tris. Hell, at this point, anybody's shorts would do.

"More." And LeClaire came back to himself, the startled posture melting away. _A werewolf,_ Damien thought again, chewing his ruined lip. Brian had vanished, and LeClaire the frontman was back. Above them, several thousand pairs of combat boots, insisting in 4/4 time that there be more, more, more.


	9. Chapter 9

VIBRATO

 

The encore was far less terrible than Damien had expected. LeClaire kept him kneeling beside him, touching his neck, or his hair, once kicking him in the thigh, but no further blazing torture occurred. He kept his eyes closed for most of it, and that was fine. The worst part, really, was his knees killing him. 

Backstage, the party was serious. The general chaos had expanded its perimeters to include most of the available space. Casey and Fathom had snuck to the fusebox and disabled something-or-other so that only the emergency lights were lit, as was their usual practice. Into this red, smoke-fogged Klingon hell of a party came MTV, cameras blazing, armed with microphones and lights on sticks. Groovy. 

"I can't do an interview," Damien was protesting, mostly to LeClaire. Tim the Manager was trailing along behind them in his mall-business-casual with a clipboard.

Brian said, "I'll do the interview. You just sit there."

Tim started shaking his head. "Actually, it's likely that they'll want to talk to Damien--"

"I'll do the interview,"

Tim subsided.

LeClaire took Damien's shirtsleeve and dragged him over to MTV's camera setup. He hooked a roll of black duct tape, pulled off a four-inch strip, and stuck it firmly and symmetrically over Damien's mouth. He tossed the tape back to its startled owner. "Better?" he said, leaning close so only Damien could hear.

Damien nodded, bunted his face into LeClaire's shoulder gratefully.

Safely out of camera range, Tristan Blade lit a joint, grinning, and wandered away to do some coke before he had to go on.

 

A line of six chairs were set up in front of the towering bank of instrument cases, monitors, and sets. Lights on tripods and cameras on wheels were trained on these empty chairs. 

Max. Kevin. Casey. Fathom. Each of them had done a hectic-halfassed repair job to makeup/clothes/hair. Everyone came in looking like they were facing a firing squad and not an interview. 

LeClaire came with Damien in tow and sat as if he owned the place, legs sprawled out and endangering cords, smoking a clove. Damien's mouth was still taped. Flashbulbs, here and there, and he pulled Damien closer, their heads leaning together, making eyes and mouthgestures for the photographers. 

Damien did his best to look eloquent and, um, soulful, or something, and to not blink when a flashbulb went off, which was impossible. All in all the tape made it far less deathsome to be photographed, since there was no risk of accidentally making a goofy smile right as the shutter clicked. He wondered how LeClaire managed. The whole thing was, dreamlike, really. The light was like the stage, but compacted into so little space that he could almost feel the weight of it. He felt, suspended by it, the pressure against him from every angle, pinning him to the chair. Easy. He turned to look at LeClaire, hoping for…..praise? And LeClaire had turned to look at him, in that exact instant, and that photograph was all over the internet less than twelve hours later.

(The photograph: LeClaire, in three-quarter profile, mouth tensed in a nasty dark kind of amusement, but his eyes, utterly…unmasked, and just, at utter subzero. Like holes, sort of, except that behind the holes, was…)

and now, Damien was completely in LeClaire's lap. It was sort of liberating to be unable to speak; he was more or less relaxed, though he felt like he was blushing. He just listened to the interview going on over his head, and watched the cameras. He turned to look at Kevin, once. A still of that shot ended up on the hard drive of a thirteen-year-old boy in Minnesota. Since only Damien was in the picture, it wasn't clear what he was looking at, and some of the meaning was kind of, lost.  
There were questions, but Kev didn't hear any of them. He couldn't, quite, see, or something….just this white, pulsing blur. It was way, way too much rage for him to deal with in any kind of legal way, so he had basically…left his hook off the receiver, so to speak. He'd fixed, drank four cups of coffee, gotten himself reasonably dressed and shown up, all on autopilot, all in less than ten minutes. The really real Kevin was sitting in dreamspace by himself someplace, twitching with loneliness. No, jealousy. Jealousy was better. Yeah.

 

Fourteen minutes later it was over. Max sprawled out almost toppling his chair, sighing in exaggerated relief. Kev slid forward to the edge of his chair and lit a cigarette. Casey and Fathom were whispering with their heads together.

Damien half-expected LeClaire to leave the tape where it was, but Brian  
reached up and tore it off, almost the second the cameras were off. It wasn't as bad as people let on in movies, but it made his chin and his lips and his cheeks sting, briefly. 

"I can't believe that worked," LeClaire said, low enough and close enough for only Damien to hear him. "I wonder what else rock stars can get away with." He leaned in and kissed one tiny kiss, just below Damien's bottom lip. That was much more painful than the tape business.

Judecca slammed and wailed and machined along above them. Max's little boom box wasn't much competition, but he had it playing at top volume anyway. Noise and darkness and mess and laughter and drugs. 

After midnight or so they split the party into five smaller ones and maneuvered them onto the buses. Damien existed in a series of blurs. Cocaine--his first time doing enough to get that lemon-aspirin-bleach taste trickling down into the back of his throat. LeClaire on the phone with his free ear plugged by his finger, with Max holding his rum and coke and tipping it so he could drink every so often. Four girls and two boys on the other side of the chain-link fence around the parking lot, begging for autographs. Tristan Blade, telling Damien while casually holding a burning joint, that he'd "done really well, been really together." Damien felt neither well nor together, but he suspected he was having fun anyway. LeClaire, opening his mouth to inflict a series of cocaine-numbed kisses, holding him up with his back against a wall and his feet dangling a foot off the floor, both of them burning with triumph. 

All a blur, as if he might be jolted out of it by his alarm clock at any moment, as if he might stagger out of his bedroom and have coffee and a joint with Kate and then limp his dumbass car to his horrible job. Except that the alarmclock never came. 

Only one bit of that night was really clear; the icewater blue instant that they'd told him the good news/bad news. He was on the bus, maybe their bus, he couldn't tell, on the couch dazed and humming, between LeClaire and Blade. LeClaire was in his ear, holding both his hands, saying footage every hour for at least two days and video and pivotal to the stage show. He realized they had him cornered for a reason, and that the reason was so they could tag-team him to convince him to endure this atrocity exhibition EVERY MOTHERFUCKING NIGHT for the rest of the tour. 

He narrowed in on LeClaire, and said, "You're not…..kidding?"

Brian LeClaire and Tristan Blade, both staring at him. Waiting for the inevitable yes.

FAME

Then it was morning. All of them were hung over, crowded into the breakfast nook/lounge section, staring at MTV because unfortunately that was the only way to make sure they caught the news. Max, ever faithful, had the TV on MUTE and had his stereo running so they could listen to music that didn't suck. At seven AM the first news started with its idiot whirling logo. The music was killed, the TV volume raised significantly, and the bus was silent.

 

The talking head was replaced by footage of Blade onstage, and a shiny-but-serious voiceover, praising Judecca Tree's status as "integral to the evolution of industrial music" ("Whatever that means, " Kincaid threw in, sending a crooked burst of nervous laughter ricocheting through the group). Then it plunged headlong into JT's rising-star opening band, who had just exploded onto the music scene in a shrapnel-cloud of controversy. They rattled on about this over a full-metal-assault collage. A nice artsy vibrato shot of Damien in black and white, mouth replaced by a blacktape rectangle, like something censored. Biofuck playing in the background. A floor-level choppy few seconds of the onstage beating, the angle crooked and crazy.

Damien watched this through sleep-deprived eyes, hitting whatever sort of drug delivery system was handed to him, his eyes positively superglued to the screen. The usual, thoughts, one might have at a time like this, my god, I'm on MTV, my god, I had no idea I was that TINY, holy shit, I wonder of Kate/Mom/Dad will see it…

He looked over at Kevin, and Kev was watching the screen with his eyes looking…..wounded, sick, something. He looked at Damien, with that uncanny Jedi sense he had, and Damien had to look away from what he thought he saw, like, telepathy: you poor kid. 

He stared at the screen again, and something in his looking away must have been too, abrupt, or something, because Kevin leaned over Max and LeClaire and poked him and said, "You look great," and smiled, to sort of, apologize.

Damien smiled, feeling better, and just then Kev came on in his garter belt and fishnet stockings and shinyblack shorts, and he could say "So do you," and they were both telling the truth.

The cheering, punching, poking, and drinking was starting up again. LeClaire was unmoved. His eyes never left the screen. He beckoned for Tim, and said "I want a tape and a transcript of this." 

PASSWORD

By nine or ten, people were drifting to sleep here and there, draped across chairs or floor or other people. Damien was still awake, determined to keep LeClaire company. He was afraid he'd, snap, from sheer hyperactive nervousness if he tried to let himself sleep anyway. He stumbled to the bathroom now and then, just to verify that he was still bleeding. That was sort of…nice, in a psycho way, that proof that he'd been so thoroughly fucked. 

Kevin was awake, sort of. He'd been vanishing periodically, and returning each time more distant and dazed, and far more likely to trip over things. LeClaire didn't look twice. 

So the three of them were all watching when it happened. Their four minutes of footage had almost doubled, and the Judecca Tree intro had been quietly cut. Apparently in the three or so hours since the first air of their sex mischief, four organizations--two religious, one GLBT, and one domestic violence prevention--had made extremely negative statements to the press in general and MTV in particular. 

Religious: ChristCenter Coalition. Well, the obvious complaints: boys in makeup, sodomy, Leviticus objections, garnished with a sprig of Paul-the-Closeted-Fag-Apostle for flavor. Blah.

GLBT: a weird little pseudo-ACLU called Created Equal, publicly decrying Deathstyle © and Mr. Brian LeClaire for their "inappropriate, stereotypical portrayal of a sexual behavior engaged in by a small minority of GLBT Americans." Apparently he had broken some kind of secret gay rule, in clearly demonstrating his kink vicious topness with a rock band backing him up. Gay was still A-OK, but s/m you could dance to was grounds for excommunication and law suits.

Kevin: "Shit."

LeClaire: "Shhhh."

Max, sleepdazed: "But it's crazy--"

Kevin: "Yeah, and awful--"

LeClaire: "And part of the plan, and it's working, now shut up so I can hear."

Domestic violence: a crazed group called Not One More, with a rabid possible lesbian fairly chewing off her tongue, claiming LeClaire was "glorifying, sexualizing, and advocating same-sex spouse abuse." Coincidentally, same-sex spouse abuse was getting very little press until the Deathstyle "incident" but here was their web address and a phone number if you wanted to be counseled, get rescued, get a lawyer, or make a tax-deductible charitable donation.

MTV finally got tired of this rabid haterness, and closed by rattling off Deathstyle's next few tour dates (good) and segueing into coverage of some dumbass corporate pop band whose token African-American had been arrested for, oh, who cares.

"Now what?" Kevin said. He was talking to LeClaire, but looking at Damien. 

LeClaire shrugged. "Now we play Jacksonville."


	10. Chapter 10

BIBLE (BELT)

 

Jacksonville was a twitching, festering colony of the sort of people that hated the sort of band that Deathstyle was. They had never really heard of Judecca Tree, and wouldn't have understood it if they had, but the name sounded plenty Satanic to them anyway.

This wildly unplanned and confused sort of coalescing outrage was intensified by MTV's constantly minutely altering the newscast. The rumors had hit the Net; Fathom discovered a mind-blowing list of things that had been seen by kids who were supposedly at last night's show. Hardcore fucking, LeClaire stabbing "that kid" with a fake knife, a real knife, a real knife but with "that kid" wearing a shield and a blisterpak of fake blood. A goat sacrifice. This was clearly Blade's fault, since he did in fact have a goat onstage briefly. However, said goat was on a bus in a huge crate being petted and fed junk food by drunken roadies, so he's pretty much, fine.

"Wow, I missed all the best parts of the show," Max said, mournfully.

"Max." LeClaire was getting pretty tired of explaining this. "They're supposed to do exactly this."

"Why?"

"You'll see why, once we get to the show." LeClaire drilled him in the shoulder, punching one degree harder than playful, to emphasize this. Max cringed, rescuing his chips, did the you're-a-fucker glare, hurt, and slid out of reach with the entire bowl of chips in tow. 

 

The arena wasn't exactly surrounded, but there was a medium-sized crowd in front of it harassing the goodguys in monochrome black-clothes-whiteface. The goths were patiently hitting the ticket window, handing over money for twoplus hours of this socially unacceptable poison. The harassers were Christians in Jesus t-shirts and Gap pants and queers in Abercrombie and Gap pants. 

The queers kept trying to hand pamphlets to the Christians, and the Christians kept trying to hand pamphlets to everybody. All of them stopped and stared at the fleet of buses, looking either surprised, horrified, or delighted that the band had actually shown up. 

Kev and Damien had gone to that side of the bus to sort of scope out the battlefield. Kev shook his head. "Man. And the show isn't for hours."

"Maybe they'll get sick of it and leave," Damien said.

"Oh, no," LeClaire said across the bus. He was painting his nails a deep blueviolet. "Those are the especially rabid, gung-ho, self-help freaks. Everyone else will join them. After they get off work at five." He sneered at this, a general sort of disdain for day-job types and activists alike.

ELEVATOR MUSIC (UP)

 

They checked into a hotel, commandeered a corner of the mostly-empty downstairs bar, and convened to plan their battle tactics. 

"The police are already quite, interested," Tim was saying. "Several news crews, independent persons….."

LeClaire was sitting on the edge of his chair, hands and elbows sprawled out over most of the available table space, endangering a juice glass and Max's pina colada. "Fine, fine, and fine," he said. "I need a limo for here to the arena, and a staff escort. We're going in through the front doors for the soundcheck--"

Tim looked green at that. "Aw, hey, man, Brian, seriously--"

Max loved it. He would, the drama queen. "Hell yeah, that would be so in your face, awesome!"

LeClaire glared at them both, and went on. "Through the front doors, in full stage deck, so everybody needs to be dressed." To Tim, he added, "And tell the police I'll be free before the soundcheck. And tell everyone--press, rabid Christian fucks, rabid queer sign-wavers, that we're going in, through the front doors, at--" He grabbed Tim's arm to check his watch. "…three-thirty." He stood up, a general who has given his orders, with Damien a half-beat behind him, and booked for the elevators.

 

LeClaire closed the doors in the face of a gorgeous Japanese businesswoman in a suit and heels. Damien was wavering in the back left corner, exhausted and smack in the middle of that awful wasted/hangover midzone. Most people had the luxury of sleeping through that part. LeClaire watched him wobble for a minute. "You can have a break from eating for a few hours, if you want."

"A break--oh." 

LeClaire was in satisfied-predator mode, amused and getting his way. So he meant it about the break. Thank god.

"I, um, thanks. I feel like high shit," Damien said. 

LeClaire laughed at that, not cruelly, for once, and to Damien's surprise pulled him close and cupped his head and said "You are so cute," and kissed him. 

It wasn't a prelude-to-fucking-kiss, it was so…..alien, that Damien was almost, unable to kiss back. LeClaire's mouth was gentle, tongue shallow and more stroking Damien's lips than pushing inside. 

Oh, god, he's kissing me like he

(loves)

cares.

He closed his eyes, melting, and LeClaire pulled back briefly and pushed at his eyelids with his thumbs. 

He opened them obediently, and they drifted into kissing again, LeClaire's eyes making no sense, wound into one blurred sphere of dark magic. 

The elevator stopped, pinging loud enough to make Damien's hangover mad. The doors opened. 

Damien moved, and LeClaire held his head still, murmuring at him, not missing a beat. Somebody said something, shocked, and somebody else shushed him sounding sort of like they thought it was, adorable, the awwww almost audible. The doors closed without anyone stepping on. Go figure.

Damien wasn't sure what he expected when they got into their room. Assuming the right bags had been sent up, probably two-plus hours of getting dressed. He was sort of not thinking about the whole plan to walk through a mob of offended do-gooders. That or….worse. He was guiltily hoping sex would not be involved in the next day or so; he was getting pangs of agony from the costume-rack fucking…..yesterday? Had that only been a day ago?

Surprise. LeClaire steered him towards the bed, toppled him onto it, and unlaced his boots, punctuated by a hard pinch to his left Achilles tendon, possibly to delete the bottom/topness of it all. He dug through one of their bags--the right ones, actually left along the wall instead of in the middle of the floor, and brought Damien two aspirin and a large bottle of water from the tiny fridge. 

It was too good to be true, but it looked like he was actually going to be left alone to, sleep, for a while.

He lay back, drifting. Brian squeezed his ankle, dragged a blanket over him, and said, "Catch a few, two hours, maybe. We'll paint you up last." And then, probably Damien hallucinated this part, "You're so beautiful clothes and makeup are easy on you."

He cracked open one eye, but LeClaire had already gone, the latch clicking into the doorframe very, very softly.

 

Kevin was leaning against the wall in his and Max's room, watching LeClaire and Max jointly doing their makeup. LeClaire had made him change three times, and had finally approved a maroon mesh t-shirt and black leather pants with padlocks down the seams. Max was wearing a black polyester knee-length vintage dress, with neon orange feathers at the shoulders, and had his dreads defying physics.

LeClaire gave Kevin a sideways look, eyeliner pin poised in his hand. "Come here."

Jesus H. Christ in a sidecar on X. What the fuck now? Kev sighed, but he went, and LeClaire pulled him in by the neck of his shirt and said "Your lipstick is too perfect," and kissed him hard and mean and fast and let him go.

Too much. He wandered out of the bathroom, shaken, LeClaire laughing behind him, and sat down on the bed and turned on the television. His mouth was wet. He tried breathing in little puffs, lips barely parted, to evaporate this evil toxic LeClaire spit, but his tongue betrayed him by darting out for a taste. His lipstick wasn't too perfect now, he was pretty sure.

He'd always laughed, reading The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, whichever part it had been, when Ford Prefect was hanging out a window having a stupendously fucked-up day, thinking, Maybe I'll get a farm, keep some sheep. He had laughed, but right now, lying on this generic bedspread in his outfit that Brian had authorized, he knew exactly what Ford had meant.

He clicked through channels, found a shitty censored version of Hellraiser 3, and turned it up until he couldn't hear anything but Pinhead. It wasn't working.

LeClaire. Goddamnit, fuck, shit, and hell. LeClaire. 

He let his brain poke around the edges of the videofile from last night, the way you might nudge at an aching tooth, just to verify that it was still agonizing. He lay back, curled on his side, arm curved around his head to preserve his carefully smoothed hair, stared at Pinhead in his rubber and leather, with his religion of pain slash pleasure. His brain stirred that together with LeClaire and the belt and the noise and that horrible magnified left-out feeling and that unfulfillable wish double-edged to protect Damien by taking his place, weird Aztec vibes, there. 

Saint fucking Francis. Something. 

And that mortifying, erection, that had made a quick (okay, yes, and damn near effortless) jack-off part of his wardrobe change. Max squeaked in the bathroom, saying "No, no!" and laughing. Brief thumps of some kind of struggle. LeClaire, that voice like honey still buzzing with bees, saying "Just trust me, hold still." 

LeClaire. Goddamn, fuck, shit and hell. LeClaire….

 

MICROCOSM THREE: KEVIN

Six years ago, Kevin was standing behind the counter at Virgin records, halfway through an eight-hour shift that his pissy little sorority-chick manager, Vicki, had threatened twice might extend into a full twelve. He was wearing a plain black shirt with his nametag, black dress pants (no jeans, in a record fucking store, how corporate moronic could you get?) and his Docs, and eyeliner that was carefully done so that he could just claim it was his eyelashes. 

He had chewed a quarter hit of acid, before he came in, that he had torn off of his little ten strip, hoping that would at least make the goddamn day more interesting, even if only by making it more risky. All it had done was make him paranoid and his skin crawly, before wearing off around noon. Fuck it. His heroin habit was a year into the future, only a fetus now, a tiny dark fascination that made him keep all his Burroughs in a neat row on the shelf, well-thumbed and dog-eared at the especially nifty parts. 

He had twelve pennies lined up, carefully hidden under the edge of a pricechange Xerox, meaning he had thus far shortchanged twelve bucks from various customers. He didn't steal from freaks, from kids, from anyone he could tell was vaguely like himself. His main targets were yuppies, the morons who came in, consulted the top-ten list and purchased accordingly, and that fucking vomitous mass of a man who taught at the local college, who paid for everything in hundreds and demanded that all his change be "new, clean, crisp bills" though he never counted it. 

He wasn't nicking off the top for drugs or CDs or anything like that. It was mostly for food. He had the Cadillac hearse, and that purchase combined with the unnecessary way his mother had discovered he was a card-carrying faggot (opening his bedroom door in the middle of his first sixty-nine) had dumped him out of his house before he was ready. He made about seven hundred bucks a month, and that was if he got forty hours a week, and the rent for his tiny little garage apartment was five hundred and ninety, and his car insurance was eighty-six. He was stealing so he could eat, and possibly smoke. Also, in a weird sort of Sex Pistols way, the whole complication of it made the day go by faster. 

He watched the little orange digital clock on the register ticking closer to the time when he could supposedly step out for a smoke, and looked up towards the door, already half-outside in his mind, leaning against a column out of customer view with a Marlboro in his mouth. That was when he first laid eyes on Brian LeClaire. 

All the cheesy romance-novel things happened, too. His heart slammed, his mouth went dry, his hands went damp, and he forgot entirely that he wanted a cigarette, though he definitely wanted something, all right, and in his mouth would be just fine. 

He was so narrow, and so tall, so tall Kev's mouth would've been right at nipple height, and he had on black vinyl pants tucked into Docs laced up to his knee, paratrooper style, and a black t-shirt with a bloodred inverted pentagram the size of a dinner plate emblazoned on the front. A little mom-daughter pair in pastel tourist ensembles glared at that in unison, distracted from NEW RELEASES--CHRISTIAN ROCK. 

He was wearing black sunglasses, the smooth liquid oval kind, and his full mouth was inked with black, a silver ring glittering on the left side of his bottom lip. Cheekbones to positively die for, and that arsenicwhite complexion that the newgoths fucked up so totally by glopping on white base. And his hair, god, waterfall black so smooth that there was no texture to catch any light at all. 

Kev's hands tangled together. His cock jerked, actually jerked, hard enough to move his cigarettes in his pocket. He thought I'm going to dream about him for months.

This hellish vision of….loveliness?….slammed open the glass door with one hand and sauntered inside, casing the joint with smooth reptilian motions. He saw Kevin, and kind of, nodded, his mouth moving in what might have been a smile, and did a course change to glide over to the counter.

…..oh god, he's coming over here, oh god….

 

…..of course he is, you idiot, he's a customer and you're an employee and you will actually get to hear him speak, now settle DOWN and try not to act like the idiot you are for once in your stupid life….

The perfect man stopped at the counter, leaned on it with one elbow, and took off his sunglasses and tucked one earpiece into the collar of his shirt. He had dark dark eyes, chocolate colored, Coke colored, and Kevin thought deep enough to drown in, and this was what he got for reading his mother's dumbass bodice-rippers, he supposed. Milkwhite arms, inked with a spiderweb pattern from his wrist, up to where the lines vanished into his sleeves. Kev wondered how far up they went, and whether might be able to feel the lines with his tongue in the dark. 

Fuck Virgin for making him wear thin light slacks instead of thick heavy jeans.

His new crush was wearing a black cord necklace, barring him just over his adam's apple, and Kevin felt his own almost-identical necklace, un-tightened and tucked into his shirt so that Vicki wouldn't bitch about "image", and realized that you could loosen someone else's necklace like that with just your teeth. 

He opened his mouth and played the employee-recording. "Hi, can I help you?"

A grin, long straight vicious white teeth. "Probably not. Coil?"

Wow. Taste and everything, not that it would help him in this music store. Kevin made the apology-smile, thinking, God, his voice. Deep and slow and calm, like molten steel, somehow dangerous. The kind of voice that would scare you on the phone in the middle of the night, the kind of voice that came with hands in black leather gloves. "Nowhere in this city that I've ever looked."

"Alien Sex Fiend?"

"Nope."

He sighed, and rolled his gorgeous eyes. "Ministry?"

"Third time's the charm," Kev said, instantly wishing he could take it back. 

It didn't seem to have gone over too badly. His crush tilted his head. He was giving Kev the up-down-up look, eyes, lingering here and there. 

Was this guy--this beautiful guy--cruising him? Wasn't that what that was, mouth moving in socially acceptable phrases, but espresso eyes moving in socially unacceptable directions? He didn't get out much, and when he scraped up the cover charge the disco didn't seem worth the, gayness, of the two whole gay clubs. In goth clubs the gay subculture rules didn't apply; not in this town, anyway. The four whole out queers were paired off and had been for years.

He watched Kev trying to assimilate this, and said something with his eyes Kev failed to understand. "Shall we?" And he gestured out towards the store behind them. 

"Um, uh….yeah, lets." His heart had found a whole new gear. He opened the little swinging pressedwood door, and stepped out to go find Ministry, a child sacrifice, the Hope Diamond, whatever this gorgeous piece of cruelty wanted. 

Vicki was at his shoulder instantly, tan and bleached and looking her usual pissy. She loaded her voice with pep-club beauty pageant glitter. "I'm sorry, but we can't have employees receiving….visitors, during their shifts."

The guy turned to her, disdainful, letting her know she was interrupting. "I'm not a visitor, I'm a customer, and he's got it under control, thanks."

Vicki wasn't going to be knocked over as easily as that. "Well, I'd be happy to find you whatever you need." More fake perkiness. To Kevin, she said, "I need you to stay here at the register," looking quite like she knew exactly what a bitchy thing this was to do. 

 

Doomed. You cockblocking little cunt. He opened his mouth to try and come up with, something, anything.

"Actually," the guy said, and turned that wicked gaze on her, sliding down to her nametag by way of her Wonderbra breasts in a way that made her spine straighten angrily, "Vicki, I think…." He reached out and touched Kevin, moved his hair back over his shoulder, almost making him squeak, but he was only doing the nametag trick again, "Kevin, would know a little more about the band I'm interested in. Don't you think so, Kev?"

"Um," Kev put in, since it seemed to be his line. Man, he was really showing his fucking Harvard education today with his witty repartee.

"Maybe you could be a doll and watch the register for him for a second? Thanks." And he stepped back, waiting for Kev to lead him, without the slightest doubt that he would be obeyed. 

Kev thought, I'm in love, with no idea what a prophecy of doom this was, and android-staggered his way towards ROCK/METAL, with Vicki's deathlook promising dire vengeance at his back.

 

"Is she always such a bitch?" the guy said, quite loud enough for Vicki to hear. Kev thought, yep, official, I'm in love. He shrugged, hoping it looked, noncommittal, knowing her eyes were still on him, thinking about his rent to keep himself from saying Pretty much.

"Any particular album?"

"Whichever one 'Thieves' is on," he said, almost absently. They stopped and Kev thumbed along behind the M card, finding A Mind is a Terrible thing to Taste all too soon. He'd been kind of hoping they wouldn't have it, so he could try to talk him into a special order, thereby getting name/address/phone number, not that he'd ever dare to call. He handed it over, trying like crazy to find something cute and intelligent to say about it, and drawing a goddamn blank.

The guy checked it out, looking at front and back, still, that weird aristocracy vibe pouring off him, nodding. Then he held the CD in one hand, and held the other out to Kevin. "Brian LeClaire."

"Um…." He shook, superconscious of how wet his palm was, how warm Brian's hand was, and the heavy pressure of his rings. "Kevin Culley."

 

"Yeah. Sales associate." Brian reached out and flicked his nametag again, the jolt sending the coldness of the pin against Kevin's chest perilously close to his nipple. "Are you family?"

This wiped him blank, for a second he thought Brian was asking him if he was in the Mafia, for chrissakes. Then he realized what he meant, from a book again, or something, probably, and blushed furiously, stammering a song in the key of uh, well.

Brian grinned, and saved him from it by saying,, "I thought so." And that seemed to be it, really, he was turning towards the register. 

Kevin followed, vaguely thinking, I thought so? Can everyfuckingbody TELL, for chrissakes? He was utterly failing not to check out Brian's perfect almost non-existent ass, the sculpture-elegant points of shoulderblade and spine under the black cotton t-shirt and silkstraight hair. 

He remembered very clearly, now, his wish for a cigarette, and spontaneously had a plan that might actually, work. It was now or never, so he said to Vicki, "Since you're up here, I'm gonna take my break," and ducked out the door before she could say anything. 

Brian watched him go, amused, maybe, and plunked down the CD. Kev overheard him asking her something inane about discounts. Was he doing that on purpose, to keep her off him, so he could go outside, so…no. No way. Nothing ever worked like that, and he knew it.

 

Except, just this once, it did.

Brian did his hood strut out the door, nearly knocking over a prep-jock who was Gapped from head to toe. He folded that delicious spidery frame to sit on the curb beside Kevin, and arched his back, raising his hips. This confused Kev utterly until Brian reached into his skintight pocket and wrestled out a pack of cloves. He seemed to, situate himself along the way, sending Kev what might have been a look or might have been nothing. 

He put one black cigarette in his mouth, leaned over, and touched the tip of it to the Marlboro Kev had in his mouth. Kev's lungs froze, with a painful half-drag trapped inside them. He could smell Brian, clove and boy and sweat and soap. He had time to think if he doesn't hurry I will actually fucking come in my pants, before Brian leaned back, puffing, leaving Kev trembling, trying to fruitlessly try to arrange his pants and his knees to avoid the tentpost look.

"So, do you have a band or anything? Kevin?"

He's just saying my name on purpose, to…..To what? Come on, this was like fifteen jillion clues, surely as amazing, unlikely, unprecedented as it was, he could actually go ahead and presume Brian was hitting on him? "Um, I play guitar, but I haven't really, found, anyone…."

Brian's eyes lit up, interest and something, predatory, gleaming there. "Yeah? We're trying to start one, me and this guy Max, you should come over sometime and sit in, see how it works."

God oh god. "Yeah, cool, um…..when?" Too eager? Too soon? Fuck, fuck, fuck….

Brian shrugged. "When you getting out of this hellhole?"

"Five," he said, before he could reconsider. Fuck Vicki. 

 

Vicki rolled her eyes and did her shrill bitching/whining about responsibility and teamwork. Kev patiently told her he was leaving at five, so sorry, he was scheduled to leave at five and he had somewhere to be. He heard her venting at her brunette counterpart over in Classical about where that somewhere might be. "Oh my god and I think they kissed outside, and it was so. Gross. Totally, unbelievable. That should be, like, illegal, shouldn't it? I mean, out in public. In front of, like, people."

He gritted his teeth and pretended not to hear it. He had fucking watched her trade enough spit to irrigate a small field of marijuana with her fratboy toy. Out in public. In front of, like, people. And usually this visitor showed up at least once a day during her shift. He'd never been so horrified he'd had to whine to a coworker. Breeders. It never fucking ended.

The four hours and forty-five minutes crept by with truly stupendous slowness, and he spent the last two hours sneaking out for two-puff illegal smoke breaks, absolutely convinced that Brian would not show, and that was provided he hadn't hallucinated him entirely. 

At four-thirty, Kevin waited till Vicki and her little flunky were out of eyeshot, scooped seventeen pennies off the counter and dumped them into his drawer, fished out a ten, a five, and two ones, and palmed them. He wandered out of the cashier jail, pretending to straighten a Paul Simon display, and pocketed it.

At four-forty-five, Kevin went in the bathroom, in the handicapped stall so he could use the mirror, discovered that he had not in fact broken out, hallelujah, dragged wet fingers through his hair, wishing he'd had it trimmed so it was a neat A-line instead of a past-shoulderlength nothing. He touched up his eyeliner to make it a little less subtle, and tried to sort of brush his teeth with water and his finger and a crunched-up breath mint. 

At four-fifty-five, with his hard-stolen seventeen bucks in his pocket and his heart jittering around in the vicinity of his tonsils, he stood in the back and stared at the timeclock until it said five oh oh, clocked out, shoved his nametag in his pocket, put a cigarette in his mouth, and went outside, certain that Brian hadn't shown up.

But there he was, leaning against a red Fiero, of all things, smoking another clove. He did that lazy underwater goth wave, and Kev waved back, crossing the parking lot and damn near getting flattened by a Volvo. "Hey."

Brian nodded. "You want to follow me, or what?" 

Fuck. Kevin looked over at his beloved, cherished, ancient Cadillac hearse, obscure band stickers and all, pondering its safety in the parking lot for god knew how long. He wanted to be trapped in the teeny Fiero with Brian so bad he could taste it, but his car, his gorgeous luscious hearse. "Uh, I better, you know, the car is pretty much a target for the jerks…" 

He gestured, and Brian got it. "Cool. I'll try not to lose you."

Kev went to his car, watching over his shoulder to see how the fuck Brian would fold himself into a car that tiny. He got in, cigarette dropping a cylinder of ash on his pants, and almost flooded it out in his nervous terror. He backed up. Brian was cheerfully blocking traffic ahead of him, waiting. 

They did a weird dogfight drive at speeds that made Kevin finally stop looking at the gauge, concentrating on Brian's taillights. The sun had set and stars were almost visible, when Brian finally turned into an old row of houses that had been butchered into an apartment complex. He piloted into a parking space in front of half a dingy house, black Halloween lights strung over the sagging porch, and cut the ignition. 

Kev parked beside him, muttering oh god oh god to himself, and lit his fourth cigarette in thirty minutes. He opened the door, tried to climb out like an idiot with his seatbelt still fastened, swore, unfastened it, and succeeded in standing up and closing the door behind him without further embarrassment.

Tucked into the screen door was a sign that said NO SOLICITORS, and under that someone had written in violet paint marker ESPECIALLY IF YOU'RE SELLING JESUS. Brian screeched this open, wrestled his keys into four successive locks, and shouldered the wooden door until it swung inward.

They stepped in, Kev stopping just a few feet inside, watching Brian's shadow grope his way to a floor lamp. A click, and a red lightbulb illuminated a mostly empty front room, the walls a paint disaster, the worn brownish carpet dappled here and there with books, black clothing, an amplifier and an octopus tangle of cords. A stereo, with a turntable precariously attached, sitting on a row of red plastic milk crates. Posters, here and there, over the patchwork walls: David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne, Joy Division, Vic Fiend grimacing for the camera. Smells of weed and damp and pizza and beer. 

He followed Brian through a bare doorframe into a claustrophobic hallway of a kitchen, leaned against the wall out of the way while he opened the mostly-bare fridge, pulled out a two liter of Coke, rummaged in a cabinet and drew out a bottle of rum. He watched him scavenge for clean glasses. 

I've been here before.

That was not exactly it; more like he'd known, all his life, that he would be here eventually. That had to be why he had carried his second-best guitar in the back of the hearse since he'd been kicked out of his mother's house. 

 

He took the glass Brian handed him, watched him vanish and reappear with a cigar box and a water bong, watched him pack a bowl, waiting to see what else might seem familiar.

 

They smoked. Drank. Listened to scratchy Bauhaus on vinyl. Kevin wiped his finger around the mouthpiece of the bong when Brian was in the kitchen, and put this faint blacklipstick smear in his mouth, doing that sort of Zen thing where you didn't really bother to analyze how creepy you were being. "So this guy Max, does he live around here?"

"Down the hall. Second bedroom on the left. " Brian said from the kitchen, returning with a fresh drink and the bottle, and topping Kev's half empty glass with rum. 

Oh. An ice age started at Kev's toes and left a trail of destruction on its way to his stomach. "So, he's your, uh--"

"Bassist." Brian settled down beside him again, his knee brushing Kevin's, and took the bong from him. "He's my….best friend, I guess." 

He didn't look at Kevin, as if this were a goofy thing to say. Kevin could not have named one single friend, best or otherwise, if a .45 had been pointed at his temple. He thought it must be kind of, nice, to be able to say that about anyone, but he couldn't figure out how to explain that to Brian without sounding like an idiot, so he waited for his hit. He didn't realize he was smiling. 

Two hours. Nothing that earth-shattering really happened. They sat and smoked and listened to Bauhaus and waited for Max to get off work and get home. Brian told stories and made wild observations and went on riffs about world conquest and gay conservatives and Kev laughed and had a good time in spite of himself.

They ended up on music again, god knew how, and Kevin said "So Max is your bassist, do you do, um, synth…"

"Singer," LeClaire said, as if that were obvious. He looked at Kev funny, and did this pose-thing with eyes and lips and shoulders, almost as if he was getting ready to demonstrate his, singerness, and Kev kept a straight face for about point eight seconds and then lost it.

(goddammit, leclaire)

And yeah, he was having generally a great time.

About twenty minutes later somebody did the cop-knock at the front door and did this sort of sustained Sepultura/Deicide wail of the word cocksucker. Kev almost ran into the kitchen, hands swarming out to collect and hide the bong, but Brian just stood up and yanked open the door, revealing a six-foot dreadlocked cutie with a septum-ring, still bedecked in Cinnabon apron and laden down with plastic bags.

"Greetings," said Max. He grinned, staggered inside, and dropped several armloads of six-packs and laundry and a notebook of sheet music and an ammo box that rattled like he had makeup inside. To Kevin, "Oh my god, is that your hearse? That car is fuckin brutal, hell yeah…" He made a grab for Kev's hands, which was lucky, because he came this close to going facefirst over a bag. He stepped over it, nonchalantly, prattling about Kev's car at breakneck speed, and deedled his way over to take the bong from Brian.

Brian pointed in an X. "Max, Kevin, Kevin, Max."

So that was okay.

 

After half an hour of tangential debate they'd settled on Danzig. Just to give everything a whirl they really needed a song all three of them knew, and that seemed to be the only band they had in common that they could handle with minimal equipment.

Kev had gotten his guitar out of his car without falling down the steps and wrestled it into tune. He plugged it in without any of the wailing embarrassing feedback you risked with everybody's setup but your own. Brian sat on the wooden box that had been half of the coffee table, mic in his hand, just chilling. Kev tapped his pedal, a nifty three-way deal that fit in his guitar case and did a wide variety of tasty things to his sound, and they were ready.

Max was holding his bass low low slung, and he fell in first and did one of the three songs Kev had been expecting, slow and bluesy and nasty and easy, and before he could let himself be nervous or anything else he just let himself be a guitarist and dropped in bright green and lush and wicked. Brian smiled.

He gestured for them to roll through the intro again, and he stood up, uncoiling, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet just, feeling it, and Kev did a mellow trill on the chord progression when he came back around to it again, and Brian smiled again, eyes drifting closed, and his hand came up and did a lazy yeah, more, gesture, and Kev was smiling, too, but he didn't know it. And of course he changed the pronoun, and from he rides on, there was nothing he could do but play, and keep it New Orleans and greasy and liquid because oh, my, god,

let loose upon the world, he is the night

And he didn't hesitate on the wail, did it effortlessly and easily and without a flicker of worry. Brian's voice was just…golden…gravel and Jim Morrison and hell and death and sex and Satan. He knew exactly how much of it he had. He knew exactly what to do with every bit of it.

Something like a meteor trail was lighting Kevin up from the top of his head to the toes of his boots, and he dared to think, we're really fucking, good.

 

He was saying something, about beer, or some Japanese restaurant, the bong forgotten in his hand, when Brian reached out and tugged the necklace out from under his shirt. He pulled until Kevin had to lean over and examined the double knots, and looked into Kev's eyes, all amusement and recognition, and he pulled with his fingernails to tighten it and kept going, moving his hair and setting it tight around his throat, just over his windpipe, centering it and taking up another half inch of slack here and there. Kevin spent this time mostly, frozen, quivering, kind of, dumbfounded, and so confused by what the fuck this was, flirting or just weirdity and should he, do something back?

"Um, Vick, bitches, if I wear it." He remembered to exhale, but he was still holding his ribcage, tense, or something, and all it did was hurt, like his lungs had slipped a gear. Brian, not quite smiled, but the shape of his mouth changed and his eyelashes lowered and he leaned in with his finger hooked through this choker and kissed just over the cords, and forced his tongue between them and licked one wet comma.

That was really all it took.

Kev's self-restraint had been on red alert all fucking night and that threw his circuit breaker, and he put his hands in Brian's hair and drew his mouth hard against his neck. He wanted a bruise. He made a hum in the shape of a chord, and leaned his head back to give Brian room. About. Fucking. Time.

"Not…in…the….living room…." Kev said, after long wet minutes. Brian stood up, pulling him with him, and walked him across the room and down the hall. Bootheels. Brian hitting the wall with his shoulder because Kevin's feet were dragging because he was so, crippled with like, ……relief? awe? sheer jaw-dropped amazement? Okay, no. Lust. Yeah. That was it.

Brian got the bedroom door open, and it creaked and spilled them into a dark warm room. Kevin felt the edge of a bed behind him and a serpentpile of satin comforter and he had this vague, worry that he should take his shoes off, and then Brian was on him and over him pushing him back and his knees were apart and it was much too fast and then it, wasn't, he was doing the, kissing, above his necklace again, just leaning there on hands and knees like a spider above him. the door was still open behind Brian, and Kev could see his shadow in the green streetlight gleam from front door.

Brian was being so slow with his tongue like he was, waiting, for Kevin to snap, and he had to say something. He toyed with saying harder, briefly, in that marijuana-clear sort of tangential way, but lacked the essential, balls, to try to pull that off just yet. Hmmm. He came up with, "I'm, new, at this…."

A hum, like Brian was pondering this. "How new? How old are you?"

Goddamnit, he could actually hook his tongue underneath the cord and pull it, hard enough for Kevin to feel the of it at the back of his neck..

"Pretty…new….oh…uh…...twenty. Even."

A laugh for the sake of even. "Are you tired of being new?"

Now Kevin laughed. And he heard himself saying, "Pretty, much…"

Brian hooked his fingers through Kev's belt loops and pulled him up until his head and his arms tangled into some kind of metal, bedframe, so that his mouth with that prehensile fucking tongue and black lipstick was about an inch over the crotch of his pants. "How about this? Is this, new?"

"This is…. Could he feel him breathing? Through his pants? Was that possible? " …..please…."

"Just say when."

"…um…..now, is, good….or did you mean, when I'm….going to….."

goddamn, fuck, shit and

…hell…

…leclaire…

"No, when you've had, enough."

Brief, nightmarish analysis of how having enough and coming would be two different things.

He wound his hands into the bedframe, pulling himself backwards, bent rainbow-arched, and his belt was being unbuckled and his pants were being unsnapped and his zipper was being unzipped and Brian leaned in and licked him through the flap of his boxers and his toes knotted together. He wasn't new to head, per se, but most of it had been from closeted drunken morons at parties. In some girl's bedroom. Never, from someone so…beautiful, and……oh god……gifted…

LeClaire tugged his dick free of his pants. He was gasping. His eyes were paralyzed wide open, pointed at the ceiling, recording zero. Brian was, stroking him, with just his fingernails, making a low edgeless wicked sound, and he laughed. "Well?"

"Well…..don't…..stop…" He felt like a starfish. His head was turned, almost completely upside down, spine and neck aching. Brian licked from just above his scrotum to the tip of his cock and pushed hard at the hole there, as if he meant to tear him wider, and then he drew him in with one long pull, suction and heat and his throat, wet and silken and hot and so, drastic. Such…pulling…

…oh…my…he can't have meant to do that so…deep…or so…

and he did it AGAIN, only, harder, the pulling almost tight enough to hurt.

oh my god, he's doing that on…purpose…

 

::static::

 

Hellraiser 3 was over.

Oh, the statue.

and he screamed, like Brian was hurting him, and his pants were around his knees and he could feel Brian's hair on his inner thighs, and he was, licking, and, constricting with his throat, and he could pull back to breathe just far enough for Kev to feel the rush of air into his windpipe over the head of his dick. Every time. He could hear this moist, friction, sound, so loud he was certain Max could hear it, wherever he was. 

Why had nobody ever told him that this was like, consensual, cannibalism, surgery, that this was so intimate, that this was so, close to being something that wasn't sex at, all….?

Brian drew back long enough to push his thumb into his own mouth, to wet it with sweat and spit and precome. He was tugging at Kev's waist to hold him up, his cock hooked into his throat again in a throbbing kinetic mess, and he spread him with fingernails and shoved his thumb up his ass. Open heat itch oh god ache slide and he was rocking his hand, mean, god, nobody had ever done this to him, he had done it himself alone in the dark and he was positive now, that didn't count at all.

Kevin came. Brian moaned and laughed and pressed his thumb in harder, fingers cupped around Kev's ass, nails digging in. And he swallowed.

 

He was aftershocking hard. He sort of, fell, his skull rolling along the bars and ending up more or less aligned with his neck. 

Brian twistpulled his thumb free, and drew back, nipping hard just at the underside of the head of his cock to make him squeak. He turned on the bedside lamp without warning or mercy. His mouth was wet. He swallowed again, and ran out his tongue just to be an obscene fucker. 

"You didn't say when yet, but I figured I'd at least give you a breather." He still had all of his clothes and most of his makeup on, though the lipstick had seen better days. He put his thumb in his mouth and sucked on it, then patted in his pockets. He lit a joint, helping himself to the green hit, watching Kevin convulse, and then held it for Kevin to hit it.

Kev drew in christmastree smoke. He could smell, both of them, on Brian's fingers. 

He could do it. Please, oh please, just this once, let him find the James Dean-ness to pull off this line. 

"I hadn't had enough yet."

…..hallelujah, that didn't sound lame…..

LeClaire's eyebrows went up, and then he grinned smoke through his teeth.

 

They got high. Or, higher. Or whatever.

At some point Brian lifted Kevin's foot and unsnarled his shoelaces and yanked his boots off, still talking, casually moving Kev as if he were a, doll. "Stoned?"

"I'm good." Dazed. Why the fuck Brian was taking off his shoes, wasn't he supposed to get dressed now, and could he possibly drive after all that?

Brian reached over and snapped the light off again, and took the joint out of Kevin's hand and stubbed it out in the ashtray, and dragged him down again.

and then they were naked, and Kevin had his legs wrapped around Brian, and they were sticking together, and Brian had set his cock just against Kev's ass, sweatgreased sliding, nudging, grinding, asking, telling, threatening, everything but fucking…and Kevin gave up on the whole quiet/mature/suave business and he was out of his motherfucking mind, begging with little mangled noises, scared out of his wits.

LeClaire said, "…well…enough?"

and he was asking, a lot, and Kevin looked up into the dark and said "No."

and that was, all, like he'd just invited Dracula, inside, and speaking of oh…oh, god…in…side….fff….

 

::static::

 

(and it hurt, and my knees were up by my shoulders and i felt so, spread and pinned like an insect on wax, like i had your entire, attention, and it hurt, and i wanted it to go on, hurting)

(because it meant you were inside me)

(god…you…please)

 

::static::

 

he thought, oh god, I can't come again….

 

Later, Brian had said, "Do you have to work tomorrow? Today, I mean?"

He said, "Nah." He was planning to call in sick. And fuck Vicki.

 

LeClaire, in the bathroom, inquiring with much profanity as to the location of his other hairbrush. 

Oh, shit. Hard, in these fucking pants, with Brian twenty feet away, almost finished putting on his makeup.

Goddamnit. Etc.

 

ELEVATOR MUSIC (DOWN)

Damien didn't really do all that much, as far as getting ready went. He spent a dazed twenty minutes with Max blurring around him. He ended up in fingerpaint-red vinyl pants and red platforms and a black silk dress shirt, unbuttoned, hair artistically ragged, lipstick lush and metallic. Max proclaimed him fabulous, wailing jealously about how tiny he was, and orbited him in a busy prattling circle out into the hallway.

LeClaire was waiting there, leaning against the wall, smoking a clove in a silver cigarette holder under the NO SMOKING sign. His chocolate eyes and the emerald streak in his hair were the only things that kept him from being monochromatic. He was in full black SS-style regalia, hat and coat and jackboots, the lightning-bolt patches and various insignia replaced with the Deathstyle logo in gleaming silver. 

Max--well, squealed, and ran over and hugged him, delighted by this new mischief. Damien was afraid to go near him, in that delicious Halloween way. Hell. Yeah. LeClaire predator-birded himself closer, grasped the back of Damien's neck with black leather fingers and steered him towards the elevator.

Was the elevator music actually the fucking Doors? It was, it was "Light my Fire" with, steel drum percussion….gross….

There were two red-violet lines from the belt across Damien's chest. He kept trying to persuade it to hang covering them, and Brian kept promptly pushing his hands away and nudging it open again. "That's the point of it, Damien. Now quit or you can wear no shirt at all."

He quit. His mouth was dry, but his headache was gone and the sleepiness was actually fading into semi-awake. Brian kept fussing with his hair, and he leaned in and said "You need a bruise." 

Damien tensed, waiting for it, expecting maybe a punch in the face, who knew. When LeClaire didn't do anything he realized he was waiting for, consent. "Okay," he said, kind of, resigned. 

"You need a few of them, actually, that'll show up on film."

He thought, I HAVE a few of them that would show up on film, but he didn't say anything. He closed his eyes. LeClaire set to it, businesslike, bitesucking hard just below his ear, leaving a gradual trail in the direction of his collarbone. "Max…help me…get his other side…"

He squeaked at that, and struggled briefly, one heel thudding into the wall of the elevator. 

Brian clotheslined him back into place. "Shhh. Think of it as, makeup."

Max moved closer, eyes little-kid-bright and friendly. "Lean your head, like, back," he suggested, and settled on Damien's right. His breath was warm, and scented faintly with bubble gum. He did manage sort of a, tonguekiss, his fake silver eyelashes tickling Damien's chin like fucking crazy, and then collapsed with the serious giggles, as per his usual response to almost anything. Brian made a disgusted growl, biting too-hard, and leaned his forehead into Damien's shoulder, sighing. This made it worse for poor Max, who ended up sitting on the floor, his face covered.

"Kevin. Can you come show this twit of a faggot how the fuck to leave a hickey?"

A beat. And not a very long one. 

Kevin said, "I'll show both of you faggots. Move."

Silence. 

Well, Max giggling, but much more quietly.

LeClaire, motionless, his mouth sticky with lipstick pressed against Damien's neck.

Damien looked at Kevin over LeClaire's shoulder, trying to telepathically go are you crazy? what are you thinking? 

Kevin had something still and cold settling across his face like, a guy playing a serial killer in a movie. His only stared at Damien, sort of….blazing, at him, and sucked him in with Venus flytrap eyes. There was no coldness or stillness there. It was all fire and motion. 

Damien felt himself flush or pale or, something, a solid freighttrain rush of…something…

LeClaire shrugged, leaning back, doing his you little pussy smile. "So you got all that? Well, lay it out." He stepped over by Max.

Now there was nobody between them. Damien shot LeClaire one desperate look, wanting to be, protected, but LeClaire only looked, amused, and something else. Um…furious. He'll get him for this, Damien thought, and prayed very briefly to probably the same god who gave rock and roll to you, that Kevin would just blow a raspberry on his neck or back down or sneeze or anything but give him this promised lovebite.

He had time to inhale, and Kevin grabbed the back of his neck with one hand and yanked him forward. He made one kitten noise, startled by this, passion? 

He closed his eyes, and Kevin kissed his neck in lush liquid devouring mouthfuls, drawing with lips and lungs and throat, leaving flawless magenta bruises, leaving Damien unfolded and decimated and hard and scared with weak weak knees, leaving him with the fragment, not even when LeClaire, leaving him with the echo of tiny padlocks pressing against his hip.

 

Kevin knew exactly what he was risking, better than Damien did. He should've kept his mouth shut, but all that left-out feeling and that singular kiss and LeClaire fucking treating Damien like a mannequin and his hunger and his hardon--all of that, shaken-not-stirred, had ended up a color between lust and rage. He had something to, prove. Just this once he was not leaving the rock star business to motherfucking LeClaire. 

He watched LeClaire step back, and thought, fuck it, because I may never get another chance. 

He could not just bruise him. He would not. He knew that a nanosecond before his spine curved itself and his hands came up and he moved like a soundwave and pressed his mouth into Damien's throat. 

Then, he knew, very little, really…just the taste of sweat and the tiny faint metallic hint of blood if he drew hard enough. The muscles under his lips were suspensionbridge tight, shaking, hard and frightened, and he wanted to say…..something. 

Damien, shh, It's just, me…. 

He felt this kinetic terror hit critical and then…..break…tendon and skin suddenly liquid, and he felt Damien's hands twitch against his ribs, almost winding around him, and his dick shuddered and powered up with a quickness and sincerity that he'd thought junk had long since deactivated.

(i will, i will push him down right here and LeClaire can go fuck himself, because)

This was too fast, too little time, ten seconds of passion before LeClaire made a soft furious noise and grabbed Kev's shoulder and threw him off, hard enough for him to stagger into the opposite wall. 

Silence. Even Max had quit laughing.

LeClaire and Kevin, glaring. Damien, between them, his eyes closed and his neck slippery sticky dappled with lipstick and abuse.

The elevator pinged for the ground floor, and the doors opened. Tim came running, bald head gleaming, keys jangling at his belt like he was trying to scare away birds. 

LeClaire pushed Damien out first. He shouldered Kevin hard on his way by, and didn't look back. Damien turned around and walked backwards briefly, green eyes wide and sort of, blanked, until LeClaire took his upper arm cop-style and turned him around and made him walk faster.


	11. Chapter 11

MATH

The rabid sign-wavers had managed to organize a small army of people in thick glasses and non-black tshirts and blue Walmart jeans, men generally balding, women generally permed within a chemical inch of their tiny little lives. The PC queer cotillion was much smaller, distinguishable from their rightwing counterparts only by their more expensive taste in jeans and t-shirts, last week's haircuts instead of last decade's, and tendency to opt for designer sunglasses instead of the Coke-bottle look. Police were scattered everywhere. 

Droves of the standard black-clad concert kids were milling around in the center of this silliness, outnumbering cops and other authority figures at least ten to one. The kids looked mostly bored and irritated, or sort of amused by all this attention. The fundys and queer conservatives looked mostly desperate, crazed, wide-eyed with self-righteous horror, trying to talk anyone who would listen out of seeing the show, or out of being gay/a fucking bigot, depending. The cops looked mostly, er, bored, with a sprinkle of worried, kind of like they were already fed up by this whole thing and wished they were at home watching the shitty local football team and drinking shitty beer. 

Into the eye of the hurricane slid thirty feet of limousine, drawing all these sick, angry, hungry eyes like an electromagnet.

LeClaire watched all this with evil glee, just overflowing with satisfaction. This was only the beginning; he wanted the entire world's attention, and whether that attention was delighted or revolted was irrelevant. 

All these twitching fundys, foaming at the mouth, waving signs and handfuls of Kinko's manifestos and Jack Chick bullshit. Oh, they were so deliciously desperate to stop him, wound him. And blissfully, mindlessly unaware that their angry-mob-with-torches schtick was only going to illuminate him until he was blinding, until he was strong and sleek on their hate. He had thrown a harness around his enemies, and they would pull him to the top of the world without realizing it.

He loved it. 

He did fingertip waves and unnecessary hat adjustments, kisses and bedroom eyes, drawing fury and laughter and lust.

He would call Marty LeClaire a little later, inquire coolly as to whether he'd heard the news. Nonchalantly throw down numbers, head counts, profit margins, names of accusers and defenders. He'd even send the bastard tickets, maybe. Not that he'd use them. Not that LeClaire gave a damn if he used them or not. He had thousands and thousands of people to love him, hate him, notice him now. And counting.

Damien was huddled between him and Max, trying to look out all the windows at once. He looked like he expected the crowd to surround the car, shake it, something, like in a movie about the Beatles. They were creeping along so slowly that the EVENT STAFF beefcake types were walking along beside them. And there was Kincaid, for chrissakes, in navy and yellow staff drag, his insane hair under a SECURITY ballcap, cop sunglasses and no makeup. Fabulous, just priceless. He gave Deathstyle the three-sixes salute, grinning.

Brian thumped his knee into Damien's, jolting the kid out of his staring. If his eyes opened any wider they'd fall into his lap. He grasped Damien's shoulder--and wasn't that stack of triangles becoming awfully goddamned familiar?--and tugged him closer, under the pretense of checking his bruises. They were gorgeous, and very, very obvious. Perfect. 

"Don't worry. I'll protect you," he said, as kind of a joke, and kind of, not a joke. 

Damien leaned into him, and the liquid gratitude in the weight of his head was

(darling)

sickening. LeClaire punched him to make him cringe, to hear him squeak. So very pretty, that cringe, and the look that was half-hurt, half…addicted. He really was, lovely. God, that red chrome lipstick. Ouch. He'd never noticed what an exquisite mouth the kid had. Full smooth bottom lip, upper lip such a cupid's bow that lipliner made it look, fake. He ached to smear his makeup, to see if the flesh underneath really was that mathematically precise. Like with his pubic hair, for instance.

Oh, yes. Kevin and his little elevator stunt. Kevin and his infuriating combination of lazy, chickenshit, incompetent queer and tricky arrogant fuckup instigator. Kevin and his tragic eyes and his fucking needles.

Brian had been very close to a degree in psychology before he came to his senses and went with the rockstar plan. He knew Kevin's usual games were negative attention plays; he used that tactic himself quite often. The elevator thing had been different. Really different. Line-in-the-sand different. 

Was he jealous of one of them? Which one? Both? Was this really an actual, gauntlet thrown, or just a remix of the usual hit-me-please?

Probably he was reading too much into it, and the little bitch just wanted a love tap or twenty. 

Either way. Didn't matter which. The result would be the same no matter what the reason--a whole lot of sorry.

It was fun, their….dysfunction. It was all the relationship they had left, really. And, goddamn him for that elevator thing, anyway, because that had been Brian's first attempt in a very very very long time to, uh, include Kev in the, er, horseplay, and he'd had to turn it into whatever the hell kind of testosterone thing that had been. See if he ever tried to include him again. 

Even if he did miss him. 

Sort of. Sometimes. 

At least, he missed the Kevin he'd been (dating, fucking, etc, whatever) before he'd found him with a needle in his arm. End Act one, dating, begin Act Two, punching and occasional kicking.

If Kevin was jealous of, whichever, variable, it was his own goddamn fault.

Some weaknesses were attractive--fear, naiveté, innocence, uncertainty, that whole subset that equaled twinkfemme. Smoking was still sexy when done right. Chronic stonerness was sort of, cute. Coke was fabulous, and its tendency to bite the brain it feeds was, weirdly just. 

He was no Model Citizen himself, and there was plenty of room for vice in his dayplanner.

But some weaknesses were, just, nasty. Like…..oh, being a rabid garbage-pop-music junkie. Or a far-gone alky. Or a really bad liar, or a yuppie or a Jaycee, or eating E nightly and rolling around smearing ugly strangers with Vicks vap-o-rub. 

Heroin was one of the latter; a crutch for a man with two perfectly good legs. It was too much like Trish the Valium Queen LeClaire, too out of control, too much about, not-experiencing, instead of indulgence or pleasure. It too much a sign of an unfillable hole. A man who would do heroin would do…anything, would end up a shivering twitching slave, disgusting, pathetic, ruined. 

He watched Kevin leaning against the window. He looked tired, mad, bored, frustrated. Not enough data to pick one, really. 

What the hell. He was a great guitarist, despite LeClaire's professed disdain for his talent. And he was a great punching bag. Wherever he'd learned it from.

 

Kevin wasn't actually looking out the window. His head just happened to be pointed in that direction. He was doing his ten-inches-away trick again. Beyond this invisible point, the crowd was a smear; fuzzy blue blobs that were probably cops, pink blob faces with black-and-red blob mouths, like those creepy kid masks in The Wall. 

Damien, tense and stunned, tasting of child and sweat and LeClaire's shampoo.

No, no, no, no…….no…..

Heroin, goddammit Handfuls, truckloads, aircraft carriers piled with pyramids of gritty white paradise, a Cenobite booth he could step into that would iron maiden him with double zero gauge needles and ejaculate him so full of bliss that smack dripped from his nose and eyes and dick and his goddamn pores, until the pressure of it split him open in a drugquake, into little globs of flesh so saturated you could chew them and nod. Nothing else was worth, anything. Nothing else was safe, sure, unconditional. Nothing else…..stayed…

He rubbed the crook of his elbow with his thumbnail, hard. He didn't check to see if LeClaire was watching. And he didn't look at Damien, didn't want to see him as a smear.

LUCID

"I need to talk to you," LeClaire was pushing him in and closing the door. They were in a really long...broom closet. Mostly concrete, exposed pipes overhead, the works. Hmmm. There was a small radio on one of the metal shelves, quietly playing Men Without Hats. "About your, stage, appearance, tonight."

"I'm, listening." A mop went over as he brushed by it. Clack. He stood it up again, stepped on his own left shoestring with his right foot, and whammed his elbow into the shelves. The radio jittered.

LeClaire waited until this was true, and he reached into an inner pocket of that awful German trenchcoat, and removed a Manic Panic compact with a pentagram sticker on top. He opened it. White powder, used down to the metal, the puff inked on the back with fingerprints in black and red makeup. On top of this was a tiny confetti scrap of paper rolled in a scrap of cigarette cellophane. He picked it up with his fingernails. 

 

"See, I really think, that it should be different each time. I don't want the hook to be that you're screaming. I want the hook to be why you're screaming." He pincered the tiny package, and held it up. "And why you stay."

Swallow. Stare at the paper. Stare at toes. Stare at Brian. "Um, acid, yeah?"

A nod. And that endless, snake-style patience. 

LeClaire could be, mad, creepy, charming, when he wanted to. He was playing that trick now, without even saying a word. Dammit. And he knew it.

"Am I supposed to take, that much of it?"

"The plan," said LeClaire, "is for you to take it now, and around the end of our set, you should be, way up there."

Creeping horrors, and a brief little flashback of the Caterpillar from Alice in Wonderland, which had scared the shit out of him when he was a little kid. "On, stage."

A smile. The strip dragged out of the tiny wisp of cellophane, poised by LeClaire's long black nails.

SKY

 

All the lights were up. The arena was still obviously for, hockey, monster truck rallies, basketball. But it was being transformed. Kids in black were filing in, generally improving the décor, in twos and threes and fledgling actual packs of seven to fifteen. Twenty-two different people in CREW black were setting up and finding out where the second pallet of drum kit had gotten to. At stage left, sort of hanging just in front of a huge speaker, were Kincaid, Damien, and a roadie named Chad. 

Damien felt like he was…leaning, on the balls of his feet. He wasn't really; to casual observers it just looked like he was in a big damn hurry to be someplace else. Which was perfectly understandable, given the circumstances. 

LeClaire was loitering at the opposite end of the stage, just out of the audience's view, all gleaming and fascist, smoking a cigarette and holding a beer. 

He'd agreed to this. Agreed, partly because he had no idea what to expect. And it was very, very rock and roll. And Brian had asked him to, and he was an idiot. 

He gave Brian what he hoped was a--brave?--look, and stepped back so that his shoulders and his spine and his bootheels were pressed against the front of the twenty-foot speaker, and spread his arms up over his head, and waited. Bonsai.

 

They left him to it for the better part of an hour, just taped at the wrists and ankles in crucifixion posture, with generous amounts of silver tape. He'd waited for a piece over his mouth that never came. 

He wanted a cigarette.

Kids crowded near the barricade and pondered him, a few of them yelling Damien! This was a new horror. 

Autographs. He tilted his head to see his out-of-commission right hand, the hand that had signed Damien LeClaire in….notebooks. And torn the pages up, after. Hadn't he always been, practicing, really? Guitar, autographs, cocksucking, makeup, vinyl, drugs. So he'd be ready for his, destiny, or whatever….

That had to be the acid starting to work. God help him, anyway.

A strobeflare. Pictures. They were, taking, his, picture. A girl done up Cure-style, camera blocking everything but a pouff of blueblack hair and orangered lips.

He leaned his head into his shoulder, made himself look at her. He thought what would LeClaire do. His pupils were huge, spreading wide open, the better to accommodate revelations. He posed his mouth for her. She laughed, waved, a shockwave of giggles and clapping and waving spreading around her in pond ripples. He arched his back against the unmoving speaker and let the acid take him

 

He wanted LeClaire to come back. He was getting hard. His shoulders were getting sore. The crowd was a huge black blur in his peripheral vision, growing all the time, louder by the second. The cameraflashes never ended. 

He was getting glittering filthy premonitions of the Fear. 

If he could draw in LeClaire through this, lens, it would ground him. It always had before. And how much better was the flesh version, the LeClaire you could smell and taste, than the paper-headphones-handful-of-lotion edition?

Where the fuck was he?

He thought, if I concentrate on, that….all that….it'll make him come…

Acid logic.

He was at the edge of the point where he would, cease, to realize that.

 

It worked.

LeClaire mantised up to him, all Ravensbruck and Pandemonium, with the house lights still up, ignoring the roaring wail of worship that poured out of his camp in the audience. Damien could only watch him getting closer, teeth chattering and fingers jittering with tension. He thought, I love that man, and the filthy tremor of The Fear climbed up around his ribcage and gave his pounding heart a sarcastic kiss. 

Bloodcolored paint, under his eyes. Gloves. He stopped about a foot away from Damien, close enough to smell him, and did his predator-inhale like that was exactly what he was doing. "Is it working?"

"I….feel…." Like a marionette that was very loosely and badly wired together. Like hell. Like a suicide. "…..trippy."

That glove along his jaw, and LeClaire tipped his face up and looked into his eyes, that penetration look, the one he only gave to lovers and cameras. He reached inside his coat and pulled out a black silk scarf, folded it over and over and settled it over Damien's eyes. He made a noise like a kitten that doesn't want to be picked up, but he leaned his head so LeClaire could tie it in the back. Still no gag. The press of a lipstick kiss---various screams of lust, revulsion, random highness from random kids. And then he was gone. 

Now he was alone in the dark with the noise as his wall. It seemed the speaker was horizontal and he was lying on it, waiting for Aztec knives. He gritted his teeth and let the chattering work its way into his jaw. 

He couldn't remember if the soundcheck had been done or not, and prayed he wouldn't have to sit through a redneck playing the first couple of measures of Freebird ad nauseam. 

He thought of his bedroom and his posters and his quilt he'd wished a thousand times he'd brought. 

He thought of LeClaire in that same costume that had made him sit through Raiders of the Lost Ark countless goddamn times with a guilty erection. 

He thought of opening his locker at school and finding his scotch-taped mosaic of rock stars ruined with milk some wonderful upstanding Christian young man had sloshed through the vents, of his first lush green hit of weed. 

He thought, when you look at me like that can't you SEE why I stay?

 

DEMONS

 

The light was pointed right at him on purpose. Even through the blindfold he could see it. When the percussion first started it was so seismically awful that he didn't understand what it was. Then it happened again, and he thought, I can't cry, the blindfold will be soaked when he takes it off. And then Kevin fucking him dry and deep and merciless with a methamphetamine vibrato power chord, and it was too fast fast fast, and he realized he'd probably better worry about pissing himself, fuck crying.

The acid was total, the acid was loud, the acid was shaking him shaking him

(when he sings, I'll go mad)

he was, right.

 

…he sees, himself, opening his mouth, over and over, like it is being played on a TV off to his left. It's annoying. Like, told-you-so, only repeatedly. No, wait, that was a….strobe, light? 

oh, yeah, the…

 

stage, the Jacksonville show, and he was still, up, there

 

He had been convinced for awhile that he had already died of a heart attack. His mind was blown, but it insisted on continuing to take in information, even though he could make zero sense of it. He'd lost language. It was, transcendental, not that he was capable of being aware of it, which was what made it so religious in the first place.

(……….)

The (noise) ground to a halt, and the only thing left was a…movie, he thought he recognized. It sounded so familiar and so…..unlikely……that for a second he couldn't place it. Oh….god. It was the, audio, of a porn clip. He'd had it hidden on Kate's PC. How, the, fuck…

The sound was from this: a dungeon scene, a man suspended on his back with his legs up and wide apart, the master below him, in a greased glove, working his hand into the slave's ass. Neither of them had been anywhere near Damien's type, which quickly ceased to matter. The sound had been the real dick torture; the slave was making this, whine, growl, wail, groan, rising and falling through gritted teeth, sounding like an, animal.

He'd lost language.

He was so decimated by what was happening, by something so unspeakable and drastic and filthy and delicious, all he could do was make this lush feral sound

He'd watched that clip over and over again, sick and hypnotized and sweating and hard hard hard. If you could call it watching with your eyes, closed …it was……déjà vu? Presque vu? That same dread, that same nauseous flushed certainty that boot camp and The Story of O gave him. That conviction that anything that drew him so effortlessly in and terrorized him with such totality was bound to happen to him, eventually.

Then the mesh of the microphone hit his teeth, the tap amplified into a gunshot, and he, stopped, and the fistfuck soundtrack wail out of his mouth, stopped, too. A cold blade slipped under the silk along his right cheek, close to his eye, and LeClaire cut the blindfold off.

MONKEY

When LeClaire slammed open the door to Deathstyle's dressing room only Kevin was still there. His little stereo was at full attention, helping Iggy tomcat about needing somebody just like you. Kevin jumped like he'd been tasered, which should have looked guilty as all hell, considering all he was doing was laying out a line. 

LeClaire was too fucked up to notice. He came in and closed the door with a sweeping grandiose slam and leaned sprawled against the wall. Did a long, cocaine-snort and grinned like a jack-o-lantern. "I seem to, remember some business between you and me."

 

Kevin looked at the red and yellow striped little piece of a straw, thought: if i can get even half of it up before he comes at me, it'll help--

LeClaire did his Iggy Pop rolling strut closer, and sang I'm losing all my feelings/and I'm running out of friends, in a truly fucking creepy imitation, hands all tangled in his hair stripper-style. He. Was. Furious. And he was, beautiful. He was as rockstar as Kev had ever seen him in that instant. Devastation. The staring cost Kevin half a second of…hard drive failure….and then it was too late. 

One…more….step…..and LeClaire dragged Kevin's chair back from the table, leaned over it himself, and held the straw between two black fingernails and drew the line up in one long coke-cleared pull, his hair swinging forward just enough to spare Kev the actual sight of his doom unfolding.

Lovely. It was too much, really. Come on. 

Kev sat with both hands crammed against his mouth, his breath stuck in a bruise right under his voicebox, trapped before he yelled "don't!" Because, LeClaire would have turned around looking…..suspicious…..that straw pinched between his fingers, wobbling it, and he'd say why not? And what the fuck would Kevin say then?

He would have completely understood Damien's trip-deep revelation about destiny and dread. Hell, he had probably done it to himself. A self-fulfilling prophecy. They said addicts and serial killers did the same thing; they got more and more careless, secretly longing to be, caught.

LeClaire was frozen.

Kevin had almost a minute to sit paralyzed thinking please-God-he-doesn't-know, please-God-he-doesn't-know, voodoostyle. 

Gloved fingers, picked up the mirror, tilting it, tapped the not-quite-white-grains with one fingertip, and put them in his…..mouth….

He let the mirror fall. 

Its own weight carried it end over end to the tile floor, crystalline little arpeggio, and almost the very last bit of smack in the entire, room, was on the floor with dust and microscopic glass fragments. 

Um, yeah, he, knew.

Iggz: Well I was trying to leave this signal/ in a fury and it 's too strong

"You….son of a….bitch…" A step forward, more velociraptor than seventies rockstar, now. His voice was, flat, as if he were reading off the wall and had to puzzle out each word. He stopped. Wavered. "You, fucking--"

"It wasn't--I didn't have time to stop you….if you'll, just, listen--"

"Where's. The rest of it."

"There, isn't, really--"

LeClaire struck, then, crooked and crazy. 

Kevin had this weird, movie-bit, like he was the poor fuck who hit a bear with a tranquilizer dart. At such close range that he'd be mauled before his patron drug could save him. 

LeClaire put the flat of his boot high on Kevin's chest and shoved. The chair whammed ninety degrees over onto the floor, backfirst. Kev lay flailing, breath knocked out, and oh how that sucked, he hated that sensation. LeClaire straddled him, hands vicious and efficient. The gun pocket of Kev's jacket was the first place he looked. He pulled out the same old tin box, still held together with a sticker that said GOD SAVE ME FROM YOUR FOLLOWERS. 

"How can you tell when a junkie is lying?"

LeClaire opened it, slipped his fingernail under the tape holding Kev's absolute emergency hit to the lid in a twist of plastic. He left it there, closed the box and sort of, swatted Kevin with it, hitting chest and shoulder and hands and arms, slamming it harder with each word. "His...mother….fucking….lips are moving."

The heroin was rolling over him. He was fighting it with every gram of hate inside him. He stumbled up and away from Kevin, taking the box with him.

That was all Kevin could see, was his box utterly out of his reach in LeClaire's accusing hand. A suicidal flare of, rage. "That isn't yours--"

"Oh, it's all for you, whore. Don't worry." A step, messy, towards the door, box gleaming like the Grail in his Nazi hand. He grinned, crooked and psycho, and tucked the gearbox into his own gun pocket. His hand reappeared, came up to cover his mouth. A scrabbling drag at the door, and he was gone, leaving it swinging open.

Kevin lay panting. Sick. Dread and fury that was the ghost of his Mom going through his shit helping herself to anything she didn't approve of. He waited for something to happen. When nothing did he rolled onto one side. He didn't bother to get up. Crawling was fine. He crawled the glass-strewn distance to the main wreckage of his mirror, lay poking at glass, brushing it together and nudging the heroin into a little pile with his fingernail. It was possible there was microscopic glass dust in it. Fuck it. The straw had rolled, but not so far he couldn't stretch out and reach it. Chunks of mirror were crunching under his shoulder, gouging his leather jacket. 

 

Meanwhile, LeClaire was in the bathroom going for the Olympic fucking record in puking. Partly a side effect, partly due to him cramming his fingers down his throat, partly because he would have been less disgusted all around if he'd accidentally snorted powdered dogshit. He'd blown his nose repeatedly, until all that he got was blood-tinged snot. The drug was unstoppable; he could feel it trying to….disassociate him, calm and a warm weird plateau-orgasmic bliss spreading at temples and spine. He groaned, just, appalled, and tried one more time. Nothing but dry-heaves and spitting, now. He stood up, groped with his foot to flush the toilet, holding onto the walls of the stall, wobbling enough to shake the partition. He was trying to remember everything he'd ever heard about how long this bullshit lasted.

Drugs, fine. Hallucinogens, stimulants, psychedelics, weed the pope of them all, but he was strictly top-only. Fucker not fucked, rider, not ridden. And he was being ridden, hard, now.

And it was all Kevin Cullay's fault.

 

Damien was sitting in a fenced-in parking lot with Max and Kincaid, with no idea what was going on, frantically telling them both that all "this" (he seemed to think some kind of disaster was in progress) had happened because that stupid fucking comedy where Goldie Hawn joined the air force or army or whatever the fuck had scared the shit out of him when he was a little kid. 

Max was following this pretty well, since his own mutant brain made very little coherent sense most of the time. It was like, existential, maybe. 

Kincaid didn't care if he discussed the fall of fucking Communist Russia, as long as he didn't scream, strip, convulse, or anything else likely to draw the attention of the police. He nodded at the occasional truth and stared up at Orion.

Due to the whole, panic-and-distress call thang, Damien didn't hear Kev and LeClaire pass.

LeClaire had Kevin by the back of his jacket and one of his beltloops and was half-pushing, half-dragging him so fast it was more like a controlled fall. The Nazi thing lent the whole thing a sinister quality that Damien did not need to viddy on LSD. 

Max had the sense to distract him by cheerfully agreeing to help him with whatever, uh, plan, this theory was leading him towards. Maybe he'd give the kid some cliffnotes later. Or, um, not. It was looking pretty, classified.

LeClaire reined Kevin in, spared one hand to point at Damien for Max, gesturing essentially babysit. Kev kept his eyes down. He looked sort of, apathetic about the whole thing. Zombified.

Max was gonna salute or sieg heil or whatever the fuck it was, but he thought better of it and just nodded instead. With all sincerity. 

LeClaire shoved his prisoner on past the buses, towards Tim's idling rent-a-car, while Damien explained how fear could bend reality the way planets bend space to make, gravity.

Achtung, baby. Luckily the fit of giggles was status quo for Max, so he didn't get asked to explain the joke. He still had zero idea what was going on, or for once in his life he wouldn't have been laughing.

 

Back at the hotel LeClaire fought Kevin through the door of his room and kicked it closed behind them. He let go, and Kev pooled on the carpet. He cracked open one eye. He had a serious fear of being kicked in the face. Just, bring it on, already. The utterly silent trip over here was too much. The suspense was fucking killing him. 

No such mercy. LeClaire piled on the bed and left Kevin on the floor like, luggage. The heroin and the coke had turned on each other, slamming back and forth clicking off the inside of LeClaire's skull like billiard balls. He could not lie still, or restlessness would drive him insane. He could not buzz around at hyperspeed to indulge the coke, because the heroin made him exhausted and listless. So he would pace, or at least stand up and stumble, and forget why he'd gotten up in the first place. The effect was like having a strobelight strapped to your head facing your eyelids, flashing really, really slowly.

After watching LeClaire ride this for more than a minute or ten, Kevin started to sit up, getting sort of, worried, or as worried as he could get in full apathy mode. Brian was currently lying across the bed with his face covered with one arm. He said "Don't fucking move." without uncovering his eyes.

Kevin didn't. 

 

Maybe he was starting to come down, or getting used to this crazy nasty sensation, because LeClaire managed to form a thought and hold it long enough o come up with sort of a plan. He got up, holding it together reasonably better, and made it to the dresser where his makeup/shaving kit was, groping his way along furniture and wall. Once there, he dug out his little glass vial of coke, his own normal good COKE coke. If either smack or blow was going to win this one, he was sending the blow some reinforcements.

Paranoia made him dab the powder on his gums just over his top front teeth. Only when he got the icicle banana-lemon numbness signal did he cut himself a carefully conservative pair of lines. 

He wanted to feel a lot more like himself before he dealt with the little problem lying on the carpet.

The coke organized this new regiment, and waded into he battle. He was coming….up….and…..oooh, that was, much more like it. "Boom," he whispered, shaking. He looked at Kevin. Did a long coke pull-and-sniff.

 

Some of the road crew had just wheeled a rack of speakers past them, apparently either the same one or the same kind as the site of Damien's recent crucifixion. He wigged, and that was putting it mildly, begging both Kincaid and Max to help him imagine LeClaire so he would do it "loud" enough to make him appear, presumably to commute his sentence. Max was positively crippled with giggles over this, though he was fast approaching the edge of hysteria. 

"Go and...find….somebody to take us to the hotel?" he asked Kincaid, all eyelashes and pleading. Damien was pulling at his sleeve, talking way over the speed limit for a heavy traffic area. Kincaid nodded once, and took off towards the arena.

 

Breaking somebody into many repentant pieces was like anything else. Almost anyone could do it, but very few people had the talent or put in the practice to elevate it to an art form. 

Same shit as singing, really; every note had to mean something. Every blow, every look, every advance and illusory retreat had to lend itself to the desired effect. A fractured sobbing mess. Epiphany. Sincere and absolute contrition. A very, very long period of extremely sorry. For starters.

Better to start this one off with a little verbal abuse. A cappella. He cut another line, slopped Jack Daniels into a plastic hotel glass without polluting it with ice, and drank. He loved that, the almost menthol effect as all this sweet warm sting tried to burn his anesthetized throat. "Do you realize, I have the dumbest, most disgusting, lame, boring, suicidal drug for pussy little feebs ever invented in my bloodstream?"

He drank again, turned to lean against the edge of the dresser. Sparked half a joint Max had stupidly left in the ashtray. He was going to want that everything-feels-delicious vibe in a very few minutes.

"Brian, I…" A weird noise, like too many sighs crammed together. "Look, I'm sorry, all right? I just--"

"You're nowhere near sorry, you junkie sack of shit." And coke in the lead. Hallelujah.

He killed his drink, dropped the glass, laced his fingers together and backfolded them, stretching. 

Kevin stayed quiet this time. See, he was getting smarter already. "Two choices, Kev. You stay here with me until we're through--" He picked up the whole damn bottle and hit it because it was easier than picking up the cup. "You can have the rest of your filth in the morning, if you still want it."

That should have been a large motherfucking billboard with IT'S A TRAP written on it in neon yellow, but Kev had junkyvision, and LeClaire knew he couldn't get past the little black print at the bottom that said have the rest of. 

"Or?"

"Or, I give it to you now, and let you leave."

Even junkyvision told Kev to doubletake on that one.

"And call the police the second the door closes." LeClaire delivered this last like a man throwing down a royal flush when he doesn't need the money. He grinned a lot of teeth at Kev and leaned over to do a less conservative line. He looked up twitching, said in a drugcrackle, "The devil, and the deep, blue, sea….." and laughed, pleased with himself and this evil piece of work.

 

Kev found himself….considering.

Deep blue sea, yeah, of fucking pig fucking uniforms. Some choice. But he could just book to a bathroom and do the rest of it. Walk away quietly. If he did end up in jail it'd be pretty brief. The worst that would happen is that he might have to nod and smile and suffer and lie his way through a week or three of treatment bullshit. And in jail he had slightly less of a chance of boots and fists and more devious shit. Here all of the above were SOP. 

Vague will I/won't I lose my job, and a complete inability to wonder why he cared. Guitarist was too distant a concept for carpet and the edge of the bed. Right now was about the pros and cons of pigs and smack and the, Devil himself.

And did that last category have any pros? It did. It was time for foxhole honesty, here. The love of bruises and tears was as narcotic as ever. And essentially very little would…..change. Back to the familiar, mostly tolerable, sometimes fabulous drugs/bus/stage loop. Home sweet home.  
And what would it be like, that terrifying crosshairs centering on him, when LeClaire was really, really mad?

Better the Devil he knew, and all that noise.

"I'll stay," he said. He thought he was broken already, though he knew that once he really, was, he wouldn't think of much. "I'll do whatever you want, just don't, call, anyone."

LeClaire set the bottle down, shrugged out of his long leather coat, and threw it in an arc across the bed.

 

Max, Kincaid, and Damien were in Max's room. Max was sitting on the floor, vaguely trying to do a whippet while groaning and leaning in boneless bliss, because Kincaid was scratching his head. 

Damien was staring at the TV in wide-eyed wonder. Max had managed to find Troll, for fuck's sakes. He was getting warm fuzzies from the Malcolm bit, still more or less tripping balls. It was a cozy place to be in. Kincaid patted him now and then, like a sort of status-check, which was a thump with that huge hand even when he was being supergentle. He drifted.

He'd figured Kincaid out, unless you were evil and/or hostile, you were pretty much safe around him. More than safe, since any attack on anybody on, with, or near the tour was likely to end in said moron being put to the ground by a completely calm Kincaid. Stat. Sort of nice to have Klingon-style backup. 

Not that he would ever do what Max was currently doing. He was half-sprawling across Kincaid's knee, moaning in apparently agonized delight. Kincaid was rubbing his neck patiently and watching Troll. 

It was weirdly, domestic.

Damien got up, made it to the cooler, deciphered which way you had to tilt the handle to open the lid, persuaded it into handing over a coke. He sat down again on the floor by the bed, leaned his back against the cool plane of the wall. It did something….new….and when he leaned his head forward to hear the new thing better, it went away. This confused him utterly and he repeated the experiment a few times before he realized he was hearing a noise through the wall. He analyzed. It was his and LeClaire's room, and it was…..talking…..LeClaire's obelisk-egyptian rumble, and Kev's crystalline warm tenor. And then, dragging, and Kev making a noise like a pulsar. 

Awww, he's fucking him, Damien thought.

Jealousy didn't even occur to him. Instead, this theory gave him warm fuzzies again, and he smiled like a serious geek. He chased around something like that's sweet, it's about time, Kev has been so, and sat with his cheek pressed to the wall and his Coke going flat by his knee. Drifted. 

Brian wasn't fucking him.

"Would I piss on a junkie if he was on fire, Kevin?"

LeClaire bent over and just casually snatched a huge handful of his hair and dragged him. Kev made a gritted furious noise, bootheels scudding along the carpet, and LeClaire swung him up and got a better grip around his chest and pulled him into the bathroom in a kicking mess.

He didn't so much push or drop Kev into the tub as he threw him into it. Then he was, gone, every movement so laden with rage that the door slammed into the wall and the room seemed to vibrate in his wake.

Owww. Though, you know, he hadn't really hurt him yet, other than throwing him into the motherfucking ceramic tub. He tried to fathom why, exactly, he'd wanted him in the bathtub, of all places--it had sucked, yes, but there were worse places to throw him. Into the television, for instance, or the window. So, why, here?

The only answer he came up with was…impossible. One, idea, based on a drunken…..no, he, wouldn't. 

The door had rebounded almost closed. LeClaire kicked it open again. He had one object in each hand. One was the rest of the JD, and one, wasn't.

He reached under Kevin and grabbed his arm and dragged him over onto his back. More whams, bangs, and bruises. Kevin had his eyes scrunched closed, thinking, if he does this to me, I'll never be the same.

He was so certain it would be piss that when the first few stinging drops struck him he could smell it, and then he whooped in a hysterical breath and got the taste and the scent and the burn of whiskey just before LeClaire upended the bottle, soaking his shirt and hair and crotch and pants with it, stopping with maybe a quarter left. 

Kevin lay there feebly doing all the reflex things you do when your eyes, nose, mouth, and clothes are drenched in eightyproof alcohol. Mostly coughing, spitting, and suffering.

"Would I?"

Kevin was cupping his stinging eyes, his soaked hands not making it any better. "Goddamn you, Brian…..fuck….." He forced his eyes open, just in time to see a blurry LeClaire in that awful SS drag hold up object number two: a book of matches.

"…no, that's….."

He opened the matchbook. Tore out a match. Closed the matchbook. 

"…..too….really, really dangerous……I mean it….."

Struck it. Held it over Kevin.

Dropped it.


	12. Chapter 12

DEVIL'S NIGHT

Kevin screamed, pinwheeling with his feet trying to stand up, escape, anything. LeClaire pinned him down with one hand, laughing, and reached between Kev's legs and patted out the match, which was lying about one inch east of a runner of whiskey, and about two inches south of Kev's (soaked) crotch. 

Kev was wheezing. Something.

LeClaire sat up and opened the matchbook again. Kev saw this, and his feet just wouldn't, grab, in all the, wet. 

Brian was between him and the door. 

He struck another match. The pinpoint of light was the only thing in the universe, the blueorange glow filling all the space, eating all the air. He kissed the matchbook with it until it supernovaed.

"Kevin?"

His mouth was just, locked. Rictus, he thought, and for a minute the matchbook got so bright he realized he was close to fainting. He gritted out "….wouldn't…"

He hooked Kev's cigarettes out of his pocket, making him squeak, put one that was still dry in a silver cigarette holder, put it between his lips and leaned into the tiny inferno and lit it. He dropped the rest of the pack back into the tub, all painted eyes and blitzkrieg, tilting the burning matchbook to let the flame climb higher. 

He leaned over and snapped off the light. 

The fire was everything.

He let it go and it fell so fast and it landed on his chest and his shirt went alcohol blue in a rush like jetfuel burning, and he closed his eyes against the flare, screamed, screaming

he let him burn long enough to, snap

and reached over and turned on the shower full blast, and staggered back and sat sprawled on the toilet seat. He was laughing so hard he was barely making a sound. He finally got himself under control enough to turn off the shower. He pushed Kev's twitching hands out of his face and tucked the mouthpiece between his teeth.

"That was foreplay," he said.

The cigarette holder jittered, tilted. LeClaire caught it and held it upright before it fell. "Pussy. Smoke. You're not hurt. "

He wasn't hurt. He was wet and his shirt was scorched and he could smell burnt hair, though his fingers seemed to think that his hair and eyebrows were more or less intact. 

My….stupid chemistry teacher…..said water wouldn't put out an alcohol fire……

He drew in a deep lungscorcher of a drag. The cigarette tasted better than weed after a long, long dry spell, better than ice-cold beer after mowing too much grass. It was knee-weakening how nice it was to be alive. He was crying.

Hades. The River Styx. That gorgeous bastard Nazi officer in Schindler's List. His (gear) in LeClaire's pocket. Goddamn, fuck, shit and Hell.

"Why didn't you stop?"

Ah. Part two, Interrogation, also known as Confession.

"I did, I stopped…"

The cigarette holder was interfering with his tongue and his lips. LeClaire didn't move it. "For what, a week?"

Kev was twisting his head, he wanted the cigarette out of his mouth, suddenly. He had never pondered how much time you spent with it actually in your hand when you were just…..smoking…."For, almost two years." 

It was choking him. He couldn't take a breath without getting at least some smoke, and it was streaming straight from the cherry into his eyes. The smell was rapidly mutating from mouthwatering to nauseating. LeClaire's fingers spread across his mouth, the heel of his hand digging under Kev's jaw to tilt his head back, hold his teeth together. The gloves were motherfucking unnecessary, dammit anyway. The cigarette holder was gripped between his first and second fingers. One of Kev's feet thudded hard into the tub, tangled briefly against the faucet. 

"Your lips are moving," LeClaire said, dripping insincere, disappointment.

He held it for almost another minute. Maybe ten minutes. Maybe four seconds. Then he took his hand away, bringing the cigarette with it. He didn't take his knee off Kevin's chest. He put the cigarette back in his own mouth.

"I did." Lame. He was gasping and fighting not to gag, mouth and nose coated with Marlboro goodness. "I quit after you

(almost killed me)

"caught....found out, that first time. I didn't do it again until after Blade. That Christmas party was the first--"

(fuckup) 

"…fuckup."

"Mmmhmm." Smoking. Expressionless. "And how often have you been fucking up, since?"

Shit. A brief, hopeless attempt at algebra. "A, lot."

LeClaire reached down with the cigarette again; and when Kevin made a frantic noise and gritted his teeth together, he pulled on his bottom lip until he opened and put the mouthpiece back anyway. "Which brings us back to the beginning. Why didn't you stop?"

Nothing. Kev's eyes were closed.

"Smoke."

He tried. It was car exhaust and burning rubber and hitting screen, and he couldn't do it, had a positive seizure of not being able to do it, and LeClaire laughed and held him down with knee and forearm in his chest and kept the cigarette there until he went limp, just, gave up. He took it away, stood up, and plucked it out of the holder and dropped it in the tub. It went out. 

He held out his hand, waited for Kevin to take it.

 

"…please," Kevin started again, pulled himself into a ball with his cheek smashed against the corner of the bed. "Please, let me explain."

"I don't want to hear any fucking excuses. There's not a single thing you can tell me that'll make me--"

"I don't want to make you anything!" There, on anything, he was fucking crying, and the pain hadn't even started yet. He didn't feel it coming, didn't get the luxury of having it ripped out of him or beaten into him, he just, snapped. Sobbing. Sobbing, that chest-deep ugly fucking crying that he hated, that had become so goddamn familiar in the highway of years, from thirteen or so till now, god damn it. "I don't want you to stop, I don't want to ask you for--I just want you to wait a second and hear what I want to tell you and then…" A break, for all the crying he'd had to tab past to even get that much out. Another measure to suck in some breath. "And then, whatever, you, do, this time, just, please."

He either had his eyes closed or was too blurred with tears to see anything. He felt LeClaire's weight settle on the bed, but he didn't see him unpocket and light another joint, didn't see him study the dead-eyed TV and the deadbolt and the bedside lamp wishing he were somewhere else, anywhere else. He cried, waited, sniffled stinging whiskey, smelled his burnt shirt.

"So?"

A hooked-in breath, metronomed with bits of sob. Had he thought LeClaire hadn't hurt him yet? What kind of wrong bullshit was that? LeClaire had been hurting him since he first laid eyes on him, since that first synaptic recording of sunglasses, lipstick and leather.

He couldn't speak. He could feel this wonder of imperial audience closing fast. This, one, chance, to

(plead)

make some kind of case for himself. To lay out his sins, to make this penance something that might earn him

(salvation)

forgiveness.

MICROCOSM TWO: KEVIN

After LeClaire, Kev lasted at Virgin (yeah, irony) for a grand total of nine days. Vicki's coven of Gap-headed bimbos spent all nine days trying to make his life hell. Lots of giggling, snickering, conversations stopping pointedly when he walked into earshot. It would have been a lot more devastating if he had, oh, noticed, any of it.

He was too

(love)

lust-dazed to have any idea he was the object of such interest. Oblivious. He spent most of his time staring off into space. He was reasonably competent and polite to customers, but most of them went away with the distinct sensation they'd been talking to an answering machine. He was just, not, home. He was in LeClaire's house in LeClaire's bed that reeked of boy and smoke, spread and butterfly pinned, mouth open, thighs shaking. He was on the kitchen floor in the middle of the night with the refrigerator door open behind them, so very Cold Ethyl, his arms pinned behind his back, LeClaire's teeth in his neck. He was too preoccupied to even shortchange anyone. 

Showing up two hours late with a rainbow of suction marks from the nape of his neck down into his tie-less, rumpled work shirt was apparently the last straw. Vicki cornered him by the time clock before he even managed to punch in. Apparently the outraged whispers he'd left in his wake on the way to the back had tipped her off. She called him into the corner of the stockroom that passed for her office and fired him. 

He listened to her smug little speech, nodded, not really giving much of a damn, except a tired vague rejoicing that he could drive the fuck home, take aspirin, and go the fuck back to bed. She handed him a packet of "exit papers." He tweezed them out of her hand with his thumb and forefinger, smiled, and dropped them with just the smallest touch of wrist-flourish. They made a very impressive fluttering of mess. 

He kept the same distantly amused smile on his face through her sputtering, interrupting once to suggest she go fuck herself. He took off his nametag and dropped it with the pin still open. He unbuttoned, peeled off, and dropped his corporate-issued work shirt onto the snowdrift of printouts. 

She was assuring him no chance whatsoever of re-employment short of web porn if her reference had anything to do with it when he walked out, shirtless, thereby ensuring that every wanna-be valley girl in her entire coven that had drawn first shift that day had visual proof that the mauling on his neck was far from the extent of the damage.

 

Moving in with LeClaire just, happened. It wasn't exactly a decision on his part. 

He would lose the apartment, of course. If you could glorify that shithole by calling it an apartment. He was probably two to three months behind, total, on his rent. Very little cushion of patience left for his landlord to give him. On some underneath level he was pretty scared about that, too. He certainly couldn't go back home. He had no idea where he WOULD go. Stay in the apartment till the landlord finally kicked him out, stuff what he could fit into the hearse, live in his car awhile. He said something along those lines to LeClaire and Max that night, after telling them about the Vicki incident.

LeClaire said, "Well, I'm off Thursday. Max can trade keys with me, since he has that big-ass boat. We'll just bring all your shit, here."

And that was that. Kev passed the bong to Max, and the one single Arctic-pang of oh. my. god. that he had, he kept to himself. He never even really, agreed. The only one who decided, anything, was LeClaire.

That was his official notice that he was Deathstyle's guitarist, if anything was.

He only remembered one image from Moving Day: closing the back of the hearse on a span of boxes overflowing with guitar junk, ashtrays, dishes, his own long-disused bong, trashbags fat and round with clothes, his black-and-green bedspread flopping over his deflated air mattress, pillows in mismatched cases stuffed around the edges of things. 

He thought, but we'll LIVE together.

He got into the driver's seat noticing how the tip of his ignition key wouldn't leave an impression in the callouses on his fingertips. 

 

And they lived together. There was a bright stretch of days like the sixties in Hell. He remembered, stopping in the bathroom and looking for one full minute at their toothbrushes in the same cup by the sink. It was pathetic, really, how in-love he'd been. 

If he had been telling this story to anyone but LeClaire he might've said he was ashamed of it, now. All starry eyed, lying in the leather crook of Brian's arm, staring up into the ceiling fan. Grinning like an idiot. If he wasn't careful, it still made him grin like that. Insanity. 

Still, it made for a wonderful blur. Stoned in the screened-in porch paralyzed with stupid laughter, Brian beside him in the same sad state, hair tangled together. Black Sabbath playing on the turntable inside. Pizza at four am, with LeClaire sitting on the bare little cut-out bar in jeans and nothing else, bare feet pressed into the wall. Arguing metaphysics through mouthfuls of of breadstick. 

There was a very clear set of the three of them alking through the street, in the middle of the night. Max was on one side and Kev on the other and Brian in the middle like a tiny little coven, hands chainlinked, when he'd first heard Casey and Fathom through the wall, and they'd gone out listening from garage to garage till they found them. That had been one of the best ones, the door going up and the wedge of green-and-red light from their goofy band set-up, and Case standing there with his hands hovering over his keyboard, wide-eyed, like he'd been caught doing something illegal. He'd felt it then, that, click, that new sense that he was exactly where and when he, belonged. 

Brian hadn't let go of his hand. 

 

He'd ruined it himself not two months later at a dumb-ass party. 

Their first encounter with Tristan Blade had left him stranded on a couch staring at football on a projection TV. Half jocks and half hardcore, punks? What the fuck? But it was some kind of party for some kind of a punk band, maybe. Yeah. LeClaire had vacated, Tristan's hand on his back, steering him, and he had watched them go and thought, Shit, and now he was left to trying to figure out how the fuck football worked. He'd have gotten a drink but he didn't trust himself to walk. His knees were like vibrators at this point. Scared out of his wits. But thinking about it, yeah, would jinx it, probably, and meanwhile he was too nervous to, walk. 

A guy sat down next to him--L shaped couch, so not too next to him--and set down a tray on his knees. He had a driver's license held between his teeth, which he removed to say "You want one?"

Granted, they were in the--den? and nobody else really seemed to be around--the party had mostly moved itself to the pool. Still, it was awfully, rock-star jarring. The guy was of the punk variety, magenta-haired, a lil too Seth Green to be part of the actual band. Seemed mostly harmless. "H. You want one?" 

Nothing. He sort of, erm, shrugged? He felt terribly lost, a la Arthur Dent, as if he were in a strange alien land with bizarre customs. "Excuse me?" he said, finally.

"We know why they're in there. You must be freaked. You want one?"

He had to decipher that. When he thought he had most of it figured out he wondered if he might not be wrong about why they were in there, The resulting visual made him stare off into space for a little too long, and the guy laughed and leaned close and did things with the edge of his license and said, "That one, man. Ain't much. Just, like coke man..."

Um. Well. "Um, don't...aren't you supposed to, uh, shoot it?"

A lot of laughing and "No, no..." and "You get hooked like that. Like coke. That's all. Painkiller, like, to, relax you." Polite offer of the ubiquitous Mc Donald's straw, cut-down edition. 

Kev arranged himself and pulled his hair back and did it without looking like too much of a dumbass. 

Medicine-y. Not like coke, no banana, no lemon, no nose-disappearing. Weird. Very, uh, non-threatening. Wasn't this stuff like codeine and Vicodin, sort of, anyway? LSD, now, there was some vicious drug. This just seemed so, sleepy. And opium was good, yeah, so, why not?

He closed his eyes. He said, "thank you," or, something. Then he said, for reasons he could not possibly go into with LeClaire, "Why are they in there?"

Snorting. Laugh. "Tris wants him."

Uh. Flare. "He's taken."

Lots, and lots, of laugh. Kev started to hate this junkie, that relaxed blues-laugh. It didn't matter. "No, for the label."

....oh...

 

"And then it started to, like, work....." 

LeClaire took back the joint he had been passing him--for almost five minutes, without him noticing--and lit one of Kev's cigarettes and gave it to him in exchange. "What was it like?"

"Like...man, I'm explaining it....like....ahhhh....like, getting in a hot bath when your back is killing you....like, yummy." God. He just couldn't put it into English. It didn't fit. 

He was curled up at the foot of the bed, eye too close to the bedspread. LeClaire hadn't moved from sitting against the headboard. 

"And it was like, we'd just won the lottery...."he added, and thought a long time, and the marijuana made him smile. "And it got so, busy, and it made it, much better. Better than Xanax, even. Just....better. And he'd said, you won't get addicted, yeah, if you don't...you know, the, needles...." Quiet. LeClaire's boot was a blurry comma in front of him. Temptation to burrow into it with his, face. "And then you found, out."

It wasn't clear exactly how he had found out. Someone in their circle of club-kids and drug friends had, talked, probably just to make fucking conversation, probably while DOING drugs with LeClaire. Kevin hadn't even know he had, hangups, about opiates in general, courtesy of Trish LeClaire. True, he hadn't woken up the next morning and gone Hey, I snorted heroin, it was groovy, but in the general rush of oh-my-god-we're-going-to-be-signed, it sort of didn't seem, important. Kev hadn't expected to do it again, it just, kept, finding him. And it just kept, helping, in some obscure way, in this maternal-warm-womb sort of way. It wasn't a secret. The subject never came up. LeClaire ate everything from acid to peyote and did rivers of coke whenever he wanted to, what was the problem? 

He found out that LeClaire had found out, about precisely when the small of his back connected with the edge of the bar, the pizza-at-four-am bar, very, very hard, probably harder than he'd ever hit anything in his, life. 

He'd sort of, exhaled, arms still pinwheeling, trying to grasp that Brian had come home, come in, grabbed him by his tshirt, and thrown him into the fucking, bar. LeClaire hadn't even put down his jacket, for fucks' sake, no grabbing a bowl, no Kevin, let's talk, just, wham. 

He was about to--laugh? between, embarrassment, or something, and the really excruciating pain. His eyes were teared up from sheer, hurt. But he felt almost like he'd fallen all by himself, and it had made him look a little, uh, dumb. He still didn't realize that it wasn't over, still didn't realize that he was in, um, danger. Maybe LeClaire was drunk. Maybe he was playing. Maybe he would yell and yell and yell, if he was pissed off about, something, whatever the something might be. 

He didn't understand it until LeClaire, punched him. Really punched him. Just pulled one hand back and threw it in a terrible arc at his jaw, fast and totally unpulled, rings splitting his cheek open in three precise little nicks and a bruise. This time it was the back of his head that hit the bar, kind of on his way to the floor, um, yeah. He'd never thought about that, reach, in this sort of pissed-off six-foot spider, application. Flicker of lying in bed with his cheek cradled against LeClaire's, and marveling that his toes only reached the middle of Brian's shins. Toes over flat bone. 

"Goddammit, LeClaire, what the...fuck...." That was when he touched his face and the back of his head, and realized both were bleeding. His head, in particular, was bleeding rather, quickly. The first real and serious heart triphammering bolt of afraid. Half of a thought: he really, means it

And LeClaire picked him up by his shirt, again, until he could get a better grip on his, arm

 

There was a hospital involved. And morphine. He kept saying, I fell, until they finally wrote something down and quit asking him. Whee. Max drove him and stayed with him, the whole time. When they got home in the extremely wee hours of the morning, Kevin discovered his pillow and his old bedspread thrown onto the couch.

So he, quit. 

He puked and shook and took Tylenol and Imodium and Xanax and Sudafed. He drank tons of black coffee, chainsmoked, smoked so much weed his coughs had a permanent green flavor. He cried on the couch, shaking and sick, more than a handful of nights, but he made it to every single scheduled rehearsal, and every single gig, and played as well as he ever had. He gained five pounds and then lost twenty. He sweated so that he had to wash his sheets almost daily, started putting anti-perspirant/deodorant all over his chest and palms and not just under his arms. He showered at least twice a day. He still felt constantly, dirty, sticky, itchy, infected. He scratched sores into the insides of his elbows.

It never made him Trainspotting hallucinate. Afterward he decided it was a lot like, oh, quitting smoking while having a serious goddamn case of the stomach flu. It sucked, hard and completely, and was a long span of the shittiest days of his life since chicken-pox-with-pneumonia when he was eight, but he survived.  
He did NOT backslide. 

LeClaire said nothing outside of business to him--try it with just you and Max, have you seen my Biofuck notes, pass the bowl. 

He slept on the couch for the next five months.

Five months and four days after That Night, he was clean and skinny and mostly sober. He ran his ass off, playing, practicing, promoting. LeClaire, ignored him. Someone offered him some at an afterparty, and this time he did it with a needle.

 

"So it's my fault?"

That wasn't it. He circled around it for a second, noticing LeClaire was actually letting him think about it. "Not that at all....that, I did it to...."

"...get me back?"

"No!" he said, thinking Brian meant, like revenge, and then "Yes!" when he caught it. "Yes, the quitting, to make you like me again, and you didn't, care...but no, I didn't start again to like, win, or something. I wanted...." He shrugged, back to words like womb and that dumbass bathtub metaphor. Heroin was like nothing but heroin, and it was pretty good for bad cases of heartbroken.

Nothing. LeClaire watching him with those luminous espresso eyes.

TRINITY

 

Max and Kincaid were getting more friendly all the time. Damien watched them kissing with the same awww warmness for quite awhile. The realization that this was not a movie and he was being terrifically rude fractured over him for no real reason suddenly, and he flushed and stood up.

Um…he thought about it, and tried to apologize but what came out was "Hey!" like he'd just had an idea or, something. Fortunately neither one of them heard him, because he had no idea what he'd have said after such a retarded introduction.

He decided to leave it at that, opted instead for a tactical retreat. He thought maybe one of them said something behind him when he unlocked the door, but he sidestepped out and wandered into the last bit of night, empty Coke can still in his hand. He noticed it after awhile, studied it, having almost forgotten what it was, and trying to analyze what he should do with it, getting caught in the red-and-silver hieroglyphs instead.

The world had stopped making sense to Damien entirely.

He found his hotel key. It squirmed around in his hand like a beetle. He halfscreamed and lost his hotel key. In the process of trying to relocate it he discovered he had lots of money in his jacket, and since when had his Coke been empty? He started wandering around for a vending machine. He would see a place that looked likely--the end of a hallway, a juncture of corridors--but when he got there it wouldn't be what he thought it was. His feet were, um, hurting? He stood on one foot to investigate and discovered he was barefoot. 

The pilgrimage went on for quite some time. Finally he wandered past the room again, recognized it due to the White Zombie thudding through the wall. Here was his key again, little bastard had crawled back into his pocket. He opened the door.

It threw him utterly. Max and Kincaid weren't here. He couldn't remember that he'd been in their room next door. This room was an entirely different animal. 

Kev was lying on his back across the bed with his hands over his face, groaning, trying to talk, whatever he was doing hopelessly muffled. LeClaire was sitting up beside him, his left hand tangled and bony under the waistband of Kev's pants. In his right he had a stranglehold on the neck of a bottle of Jack Daniels. 

Damien was a disaster of flailing limbs, blushing the color of a taillight. Mentally he was falling over himself to leave the room. He opened his mouth, fearing for some reason the last thing he'd said--the enthusiastic hey--would just say itself again. "Oh…sorry…didn't…"

"Close the door," LeClaire said. 

He started to, pushing it back in. It hit his bare toes. He did a pretty drastic wail. It hurt like holy fuck. 

A sigh. "You poor idiot. Come in and close the door."

He stopped his agonized hopping. His hand was glued to the doorknob. The acid electroplated everything, edges so sharp they were hurting his brain, and the thudding nexus of holy-fucking-shit impaled him from the top of his head straight down to his dick. 

He took one ripping step forward. It felt like, tearing through a membrane, and the wrench freed his other foot and his hand and he stepped inside. The door clicked closed behind him, six gajillion miles away, brushing his shoulderblades. His teeth clicked closed in his mouth like an instant replay of the latch.

"Lock it," LeClaire suggested, smile dragging his mouth into a bow with a flicker of tongue as the arrow. 

Kevin was spread out sacrifice-style, pinned under his hand.

Damien groped behind him till he managed to get his hand into the dimension where the deadbolt was and at that third and final click Kev did a cellophane-thin moan, eyes open and hopeless, looking past LeClaire at Damien, pleading maybe help me or i'm sorry or what-the-fuck-is-happening? 

Damien couldn't translate it. 

Everything was running through a splitter--he could see them, he could smell alcohol, the air thick with it like a new kind of smoke. He thought, why is he wet? and did a weird graceful falling stagger and put one knee and one hand on the bed, head tilted, examining the two of them like some kind of outré museum exhibit. 

LeClaire hooked the back of his neck with the hand that wasn't busy with Kevin's crotch, pulled him lazily closer, so that it was climb onboard or thump into bed facefirst. He picked climb. The bed was too spongy, like he was sinking into it up to his elbows. More like swimming than crawling. He knelt up, squicked, looked away from Kevin for the first time to see if liquid bedspread was smeared on his arms. Nope. He shook his hand like it was wet, just to make sure, and LeClaire laughed at him and shoved him, and he fell and hit the bed about an hour later. Little noise of terror till he grasped that he wasn't going to drown in the mattress. 

He felt himself dragged, arranged, and the terrible sudden thump against his back and his skull. Oops. Eyes closed again. He opened them, found himself sitting against the headboard, watched Kev's turn to be rearranged, sucked in a noisy breath that hurt like fuck because he'd forgotten about the lung thing for so very long. 

Kev was making a sobbing kind of noise, face almost expressionless, one vertical tension line between his eyebrows, eyes closed, eyelashes a smudge. Acidflicker of a saint fallen into hell. Maybe Paul was the queer one? And tonight the part of Lucifer was being played by Brian LeClaire, one corrupt arch over him, laughing, dragging him by his hair and his twisted arm over onto his face. 

"Go on," he said, leaning close to Kev's ear, voice that mechanical throttlegrowl that sent the needles in the bass range clicking over into red. "I thought you wanted some, junkie. Grab some." Hand and rings in one lecherous knot in Kev's hair, furious lines of tension in his forearm and shoulder. 

Damien squinted down at Kev, trying to grasp that LeClaire's guitarist was facedown in his lap, trying to grasp that this was the same pretty tragic sweet boy that went swimming with him in a hotel pool eons ago. Brian's hand, between them, doing the zipper-and-snap thing, Kev's cheek turned into his thigh, that one continuous moan buzzing against his knee. 

….what, is, he…..

"Open your fucking mouth."

…and he pulled Damien by the waistband of his shorts, shoved at Kev's head, intersected them, and Damien's cock thumped against Kev's chin and his bottom lip and then then slid all the way into his throat with a scream frictioning against the head. His skull connected with the headboard again, with that same impossibly kitchenware thump, and he insisted in pieces of thought hallucination….what, the…..

LeClaire was doing the zippersnap thing to Kevin, now. Lovely white span of the small of his back--could he really, be, that, tiny?

i am so, fucking

The room was so quiet he could hear it when LeClaire shoved his fingers inside Kevin, the velvety dark noise like leather being folded

hard

and Kevin was really crying, now, and it was doing such delicious things to his throat, doing such delicious things to the shape of his eyelids.

Time was all fucked up. He felt the scream from cock to balls to brainstem before he saw LeClaire make a terrible, stabbing wrenching gesture, leaning into it from the shoulder, pulling his hand away murderously fast, fingers in his mouth before he did the zippersnap thang one last time, to himself, staggercrawling forward, thudding bonerattling hard into Kevin's back, slamming in somewhere in the tangle, sending a shockwave through Kevin in the middle, so Damien's head thudded into the headboard one, more, time, and he couldn't fucking, come, everybody knew you couldn't, fucking, come while you were on LSD, he, couldn't

and LeClaire opened those evil chocolatecolored eyes, looked up at him halflidded and mean with his hair pooling on Kev's back and his mouth, wet.

Damien's hand tangled over LeClaire's and he shoved into Kev's throat as hard as he'd ever wanted to fuck anything in his life, and the whole goddamn thing was an LSD illusion, maybe that was why he could, god, fucking…..come….

WAKE

It was the sense of being watched that woke him up. LeClaire opened his eyes to find Kevin's own looking back at him. For a sleep-blurred instant, it was the terror of the mirror having finally betrayed him. These eyes were far from empty.

They hung there. Damien was a tiny warm sleeping ball between them. Sunlight was painting the room in mustard and green through the hideous drapes. Kevin looked--what? Mild? Sad? Sorry? What the fuck was that? A, soul--

"Morning," Kev said, quiet and cautious, almost toneless. Dark circles under those terrifyingly un-empty eyes.

Whatever LeClaire had expected, it wasn't, that. "Morning," he said back, and for the first time in his life, he looked away first.

Damien murmured, unwound, wound tighter again.

He got up and staggered towards the shower. He kept his back to Kevin. He, felt, sick. Standing upright bleached the room for much longer than a blink. He covered his face, navigated his way into the bathroom by thudding his shoulder along the wall till he hit the doorframe. That goddamn song was stuck in his head, another Cooper golden fucking oldie…the one

(with the heartbreaking, mournful guitar)

the one from Dada, that album nobody liked. Yeah, "Pass the Gun Around." He chased the lyrics for a second or ten till he found the line. No wonder his brain had put that one on repeat; if he had ever in his life felt a little hotel paralyzed, it was now. 

He fumbled the bathroom door mostly closed. His SS jacket was hanging from the towel rack on the back. He didn't remember putting it there. 

His knees hit the carpet; he crawled a foot or two, did long pointless puking gestures over what was hopefully the toilet, soundlessly, hurting from the pit of his stomach to his very teeth. From there he did a wobbling half-crouched stagger into the shower, turned both knobs in varying ways till it wasn't icy and wasn't burning him, the reek of alcohol making him retch again till the shower sluiced it away. He leaned against the wall, mind mostly empty, listening to the silence in the other room.

After a very long time he felt less, polluted. Clearer. He turned it mostly off, eyed the pale androgyne in the mirror, pulled his SS jacket on out of a vague grasp that he was naked. Sort of amusing, line of flesh from throat to cock, all this wool and embroidery framing it. Fuck it. The pocket crackled; he investigated, pulled out Kevin's emergency heroin, stared at it stupidly. If anyone had asked him to describe his facial expression, he would have said furious, and he'd have gotten that question wrong. It was really more like, heartbroken.

When he came back out, intending to throw it at him, Kevin was gone. He hadn't heard the door open or close. He stood there with the same look on his face, until his hand had mercy on him and put the little cellophane back in his pocket. Fine. As long as he didn't have to look at it anymore.

Damien was in the same tiny ball, shifted left into the warm spot Kevin had presumably vacated. It made him…no, that was just more, furious. Or tried to, anyway, but he was too tired for an emotion that demanding.

He sat on the edge of the bed, watched Damien sleep, naked and tangled in the green and black bedspread and pseudowhite sheets. Leaned over him to investigate the rise and fall of his ribcage architecture. Smelled him, sniffing predatorstyle under his jaw, at the hinge of his shoulder, at his waist where cloth and skin intersected. Electric LSD sweat; sex, tongue chemistry, sleep. Kevin. Nothing, goddammit, nothing.

He buried his face in the convex of Damien's stomach. He, wanted

(nothing)

Damien to wake up, to wrap his arms around him. He didn't know why. He'd have unleashed with both fists at anyone who told him that was what he wanted.

The kid didn't move. That was fine.

He would let him sleep. He would get dressed. He would NOT go look for Kevin.

Carry him onto the bus in that blanket if I have to. Let them bill us. Fuck this hotel.

Nothing after that. 

Finally he got up, sniffed, head and throat and sinuses poisoned by the Damienscent. Did tiny hairthin lines, one after the other, till he couldn't smell anything but cold. Dressed. Had JD and ice for breakfast with hotel coffee chaser. Brushed his teeth. Checked his eyes in the mirror over and over.

LeClaire found Kevin on the bus, sitting by the window with his arms around his knees, heels hooked on the edge of the seat. Something in this stack of angles startled him; the kid looked

(broken)

sick. This pang of not-emotionless ricocheted through him, did a funny unwelcome thing to his heartbeat. It was like the feeling when a cop passed you, but tighter, smaller, more localized. It was completely, completely uncool. It made him not want to do what he did next.

He ignored this little urge to be merciful, reached into his gun pocket, pulled out Kev's emergency stash, sidearmed it at him without pausing. It hit him in the chest, just over Joey Ramone's face over his heart. He didn't look to see what Kev did with it.

He was angry the little bitch hadn't stayed, and he didn't know why.

He booked straight for his bunk, collapsed inside, dragged his feet in, boots and all, pulled the curtain. Pretended to sleep until it was true.

There was a thump, and a pouff of his curtain. The corner twitched back. He glared up at Damien's profile. He didn't let his face show anything, not relief, not disappointment, nothing but sleepy and irritated. "What?"

Damien sounded sort of thrown by this. "I, wanted, to….um…." A gesture. Wounded lonely little expression. He waited for LeClaire to bail him out, to save him from asking.

"So find an empty bunk."

He reached up, yanked the curtain closed. Didn't listen to find out what Damien did next.


	13. Chapter 13

MICROCOSM TWO: LECLAIRE

Brian remembered his last year of highschool in terms of two sudden insertions in his life: The Skater Boy, and his New Fucking Stepdad. 

The Skater boy was five-six of freshman eye candy. He had taffy brown hair with drugstore yellow bangs. He was fey, so narrow and all-eyes he looked like something drawn by somebody Japanese. He wore shorts that fell past his brown scarred knees in grimy denim fringe. His calves were perfect sharp-edged trapezoids. He was like that everywhere, all wire and bruise, a coatrack of a boy in last year's summer tshirts. 

LeClaire had discovered the sanctuary that existed inside a pair of headphones. Fourplus years incubating with his brain situated between two speakers and a book Marty wouldn't have approved of in front of his eyes. He'd progressed from Metallica and Kiss, King and LaVey to Skinny Puppy and Alien Sex Fiend, Nietzsche and Machiavelli. He wore eyeliner with black permanent marker so the teachers couldn't make him wash it off. He wore a black motorcycle jacket his mother hated. He wore sunglasses so that nobody saw the eyeliner unless he wanted them to. 

He had concluded at around thirteen that he was gay. He read books, he found his various opinions and theories mostly verified, and went back to Clive Barker and Sagan without any particular concern. He hated almost everyone, gender irrelevant. There was nobody in the small clique of misfits he sat with that would have interested him even if they were gay. He had never wanted to fuck anyone he saw outside of television until Skater Boy, so gay had hardly been an issue. 

He read different books this time, bought condoms, sidled up to Skater Boy behind the gym, lit a cigarette. They were more or less alone. Couple of kids sitting on the bike rack across the street, the occasional passing car. "You party?"

The kid shrugged, smoking a Marlboro red, looking at him with glassblue eyes. LeClaire lit a joint and passed it, and the kid took it. 

Two days later they were both in the backseat of the Cavalier Marty had bought Brian as a sixteenth birthday present. Skater boy had his left foot on a front-seat headrest, ankle decorated with black denim shorts and red CK boxers. He slid down so far his back was flat on the seat. 

LeClaire was kneeling in front of him. He grabbed under the kid's knee, bent it. His sneaker thumped into LeClaire's back. He got everyone arranged, and even managed to successfully install a condom. He'd been practicing, but there was no accounting for being under pressure. 

The kid squirmed underneath him, breathing like he'd been running, reeking of sweat and marijuana and skateboard and dirt, and he said no…no….and then Brian pushed inside him, managing not to hesitate even though the…squeakiness of it startled him. And it was a long shaken quiet, and kind of a seizure of wrapping his arms around Brian, hugging hard hard, not exactly out of affection but more as if he thought he would, fall, drown, if he didn't, and a tiny little oh

 

That was the good part, of the last year of all…..that. Most of the school year and maybe half of the summer passed in this agreeable way, smoking and chilling and cheating to pass meaningless exams. Driving up and down by the beach, stoned, with all the windows down and Black Sabbath in the tape deck. Fucking in sand, in the back seat with the doors open, in the parking lot of a church with the ocean roaring just behind them and the UFOs flickering in swoops over the water. 

He learned Skater Boy's name was apparently Poe, less than a week later, when a creature named Filch, one of the motorcycle-jacket acquaintances he had lumbered up to him and leaned one shoulder into a locker and said "So, you and Poe?" 

Brian had nodded, picking up Algebra and the tape case that had his lunchtime Coke-and-joint package. Gave Filch the same wanna-smoke-one two-alphas cool he usually did. Waited to see if he would get to leave early by fighting this elephant of a JD in this narrow brick breezeway of a fucking hallway. He was hoping for at least a few seconds warning, a threatswing or some pushy-pushy to let him do something terribly fucking harsh to put a stop to this, hospital be damned. That was really his only chance. 

Filch shrugged. He waited till Brian got his shit situated, and they left together, walking in the general direction of the courtyard. That was all.

 

Unfortunately, that was NOT all as far as the Stepfuck was concerned. He was a repulsive pale under-a-rock sort of yuppie, with a strawberry-reddish fringe of hair and a mousy little face and gold wire-rimmed glasses. He tended towards the pale-yellow-polo-shirt and khakis sort of stupid. He was an accountant with a penchant for self-help garbage and the occasional spasm of born-again. 

He was pathetic, and to make up for the powerless little nothing he was in the rest of his life, he subjected Trish and Brian to his best tries at assertiveness and leadership-ness or, whatever. It was sad. 

 

Kevin wound himself onto one of the vinyl couches, moving like he was underwater. Everything was shitty. Oh, my god, was it. It wasn't bad shit. He'd gotten bad shit before, once, and that had been a nasty sick feeling like he imagined snakebite would be, electrical and awful and instantly tasting of exhaust fumes. This was a different feeling, one that he recognized as a variation on this is cheap shit. This sensation was more like, this is REALLY cheap shit. The heroin had been badly cut or badly produced or something, or he'd left his works dirty despite his best efforts. Now Kevin felt like he had an incredibly mean virus and an incredibly high fever. 

Oh, yes, and he wasn't onstage. 

Mmm. Lovely. There was a nice memory to turn over and over in your mind while you were already nauseous. Brian, looking at him like he was some kind of exotic insect life, and saying You are just fucking worthless, aren't you? 

Oh, how outraged he had sounded, how furious, how disgusted. And then You. Damien. Check over his set-up. I need you to go on. Just that, without a second thought. 

Damien had looked at him, speechless and sorry and horrified and sympathetic. Oh, and silent. Yeah, silent. And Max had done the kind of eye-mouth-shoulders gesture that said, ouch, that sucks. Then, he'd turned and followed Brian. 

And whatever Damien had said, Kevin hadn't heard it. He'd been too busy saying Go, go on, just go. And here he was, sulking and miserable and sick. He was freezing. He thought he was hungry until he realized that he was mistaking nausea for appetite. He wanted to cry, but he couldn't even get his eyes to sting, so he gave up. He swallowed, gagged, groaned, and scooted onto his back and pulled his knees up and lay curled up like a dead spider. He had a tiny blowdart thought about what Brian was going to do later, and groaned again, before settling into his chosen coping mechanism, apathy.

"Hey. Hey, yo, your name is Kevin, yeah? Hey."

This person with the West coast accent and superfluous slang was shaking Kev's arm, gently, but goddamn persistently. He failed to ignore it, put on his James Dean expression, and peered up through his hands at his tormentor. It was one of the Judecca roadies. They had almost forty employees, for chrissakes and all but three of them were redneck, wanna-bes, or the roleplaying Led Zeppelin type. 

This guy was one of the lucky three. He had the graver look down. Ripped Tones on Tails shirt--tres obscure, oversized lowriding black jeans with massively baggy legs and white stitching and a knit cap that had O.G. embroidered on it in white calligraphy. 

Kevin grinned, bemused, feeling as if this were a hallucination he had conjured to entertain himself, and reached up and tugged the cap off, gently. Chestnut hair tumbled out, straight and thick and with just the edges of the front shaved. He looked like Jay, Silent Bob's friend from the Kevin Smith movies.  
The guy laughed, like awkwardly, and said, "Yeah, man, that's um….that's ok. You want to sit up? Yeah? This is coffee, yeah?"

The kid pressed a warm styrofoam cup into his hands, and sloshed Kev with coffee that was too transparent. Kev pushed his hair out of his face and drank, two long deep pulls that scorched his tongue and his throat and settled in a hot slam right under his sternum. "God," he said. The kid nodded, still looking that amused kind of tolerant reserved for very young children and people who were on too much acid. Something about his cheekbones and his dark eyes made him a little like LeClaire, not much, but enough for him to be interesting. 

"Yeah, man," the kid was saying, watching Kev's coffee intake very carefully. "Tris said you was done up kind of bad and maybe I should check in on you. Rough shit? Yeah, is there anything I can do to help you out?"

"Help me out," Kev repeated. Tris had sent someone to babysit him. Lovely. How incredibly fucking humiliating. And to top that off, it had been Tris who had done this, Tris who had said maybe two sentences to Kev (both polite) the entire tour, Tris and not Brian. Tris had been the only one who gave a damn, not anyone from his own goddamned band, not even Damien. 

And speaking of Damien, wasn't that him, the sound from the stage above, playing the solo intro to Sexmagnet? 

"God," he said again, and set the coffee down and held his aching head in both his hands. He patted around for his cigarettes until the kid put them in his hand, lit one, and sat up a little more and pushed his hair out of his face. His babysitter. He looked at the kid again. He really did kind of look like Brian. Vaguely. "Are you gay?"

The kid stared, then laughed. "Hey, we were talking about that. So that's true, that all you guys are gay? That's so cool, yeah, you're going to get banned, I just know. No, though, like, I'm not. Not really."

Not really. Nice. Kev decided to stick with blunt. It was working pretty well so far. "Do you want to make some money?"

"Man, hell," The kid said, chewing his thumbnail. "For what?" He interrupted before Kev could answer and added, "Because, you know, I don't want to do anything really weird--"

"That's fine," Kevin told him, cutting him off without mercy and not dropping his eyes. He waited until he was sure the kid was waiting, and then he tilted his head and his eyes towards the door.

The kid's name was Chad. He was a film school dropout and by the time he'd smoked most of a joint Kev stole from Brian's stash, he had forgotten the rest of his life story and they were kissing deeply with his hands cupped under Kev's jaw. On someone else this would have looked like tenderness. They were on the bus, alone, on the couch that was wedged in the living room section or whatever it was supposed to be. The kid had his eyes open, and he leaned back and said, "Man, I don't, you know? This isn't me. But you're pretty, man, you are."

"Thanks," Kevin said, and tried not to make it catty. The kid tasted like gym class and his first fight that had actually drawn blood and he wasn't too bad of a kisser for someone so young. He leaned in for another taste, and kissed the kid's jaw and bit lightly just below his ear. He tugged with his teeth until the kid made some kind of sound, or maybe he just moved, and Kevin said, "I need you to be….less…gentle, than this."

"Less gentle?" the kid said, uncertain now, though not entirely baffled. "I mean...you don't want me to hit you or something, do you--"

"No, " Kev said, too fast, and he didn't like how it sounded. And he felt his face fill up with blood in one quick swoosh, because he damn well wouldn't have minded, had this kid decided to backhand him. 

Along with heroin, Kev had lately picked up the habit of occasionally paying someone to….well. His sex drive was dropping faster, now, but he still had needs, and in theory it seemed so uncomplicated. In practice, though, it was awkward and mostly unsatisfying. He supposed he needed someone into domination, but paradoxically he was afraid to ask, and fairly certain that wouldn't help. He didn't want to ask or it didn't seem….well, submissive.

He kept promising himself he wouldn't do this anymore, and here he was. It was the same look what you fucking did again feeling he had every time he finished tying up. This weird, amusement, sickness, dread, dismay. That was it, that Victorian word dismay. 

"Look," he said, "I just want you to fuck me, okay?" He sounded too bored and too irritated and he knew it, but the fact that this kid would never dream of slapping him for it was the worst part. He started pulling off his shirt, peeling down to skin that didn't really have any bruises right now except one on his left hip. This was one he'd gotten himself from the corner of a table, for walking in the dark while stoned. The kid stared, until Kev unsnapped his pants. He started taking off his own shirt. 

 

Great. Halfway there. Kev pulled the kid closer again, vaguely excited, because with skin against his skin it was easier to pretend. 

Basically the kid just did not get that rougher did not mean harder. He was giving him kisses that were leaving inelegant bruises, and he chewed on Kev's nipples with enough pressure to make him squirm in misery. He wasn't even hard, for chrissakes. 

He leaned back, and let the kid leave his bruises. He conjured Brian sitting in the chair beside them, instructing his tormentor. Bite him. Yeah. Pull with your teeth like that. He kept this running for maybe five minutes, and his dick finally twitched, and sluggishly got hard. 

Kev could settle for this. He also wanted to put an end to the foreplay. The junk was wearing off, and he felt sick and depressed and mostly wanted to sleep. He leaned back away from his assailant--Chad, was it? who cared?--and gave him a bright charmschool smile, and whispered again, "Fuck me," just to see if it would help. The kid looked stunned, but still horny. He obviously had no idea how to proceed. Kev turned over, arranged himself on his hands and knees. He reached back, patted till he found the kid, kept patting until he found dick, and tugged. The kid muttered something, gasping, and unbuckled his belt.

The vertigo and pressure and general sickness pressed in on him again. He'd turned over too fast. The kid was tugging uselessly at Kev's black vinyl pants and he sighed, and unsnapped them, and struggled to pull them down because they were sweaty. He arched his back, and mumbled, "Spit on me," almost as an afterthought. He heard the kid laugh, sounding like he almost didn't believe this was going on, and felt warm spit fall on his lower back. The kid did it again, and Kev reached back and took his hand and traced long wet lines down along the crack of his ass. The kid shied away from that. Too gay, he guessed. 

"Just fuck me," he said, frustrated, bored. Whatever.

A RED DOOR

The Plan, which had evolved itself capitalization early into this….adventure…was as simple and as essentially unoriginal as it was brilliant. The first half had gone pretty smoothly. They were no longer unknown--they had all the "bad" press to thank for that, along with the cherry position as Judecca Tree's opening band for most of the North American tour.

Step Two was a single from the almost-finished Hellbound CD--the Deathstyle cover of "Paint it Black." A cover was a tried-and-true way to get airplay. The empty-vee sheep loved them some song they already knew the words to. They loved updated oldschool rock; it made them feel superior to past generations, made them feel pleasantly modern and gave them the illusion of progress, a false sense of evolution. Cheap tricks, these, but the oldest cons were oldest for a reason; they worked.

LeClaire had laid this out for Tristan with gestures and smirks and simple declarative sentences. He punctuated the twenty seconds or so of speech with the plastic impact of a CD case hitting the McDonalds table between them. 

Tristan did a come-hither over his shoulder, and one of the Judecca Tree slaves immediately brought him a Discman, considerately removing the Prodigy CD from it before he presented it to his lord and master. 

LeClaire handed the jewelcase over and lit a clove, pretending to be nonchalant. He poked his Egg McMuffin apart with a spork and arranged it into art. He felt very much like the guys you saw in movies, sitting terrified and motionless in the driver's seat while their car seesawed, creaking, on the edge of a cliff.

Tristan sat listening, headphones air-traffic-controller huge on his ears, blocking out everything, pouring in Deathstyle, player humming with Blade's small hands cupped around it. His eyes were closed for a long time, and he nodded-kneetapped with an invisible beat. This was a good sign. Then his eyes opened, staring at LeClaire round and dilated in spite of the goddamned sunlight pouring through the transparent ad on the window beside them. 

After four minutes and forty seconds he touched the little button marked with the ubiquitous STOP square--and smiled. Teeth and all.

This was a very, very good sign.

It was the teeth that made LeClaire sure, and the expression of glee Blade was failing to conceal. 

"It. Is. Perfect," Blade said, like an actor playing God might say Let there be light. 

LeClaire smiled back, finally, also teeth and all, even though he knew that already. "You want the video?"

Tristan actually laughed. This was as rare as Florida snow. "Give it to me."

LeClaire gave it to him. Hard.

 

Deathstyle had done very little, really, to "Paint it Black." The stones soft, eerie guitar intro was there, given a sexy exotic Middle Eastern feel with hammer-on, pull-off, bends from Kevin's clever fingertips. The percussion was the same, but different; thudding, relentless, jungle drums, hellish. It was the same song through a dark future's lens; it was to the Jagger/Richards masterpiece what fucking is to making love. 

LeClaire sang in bitter, wounded tones. This was the voice of a man ready to climb a clock tower and pick off pedestrians. He'd only played with the lyrics a little--I see the boys go by dressed in their hustler clothes--and when he told Blade the video, drawing a terrible passionplay in the restaurant air with his hands, Blade only stopped him once, to tilt one headphone back to his ear, to listen to this line again, to smile like a bank robber who's figured out how to crack Fort Knox. 

"They'll go crazy," he said, finally, when the idea was an invisible hologram between them and half the road crew had retreated back to the buses and the shiny happy McCollege students behind the counter were eyeing them harder, whispering longer. 

"Good," LeClaire said. Careless, very James Dean, but it wasn't because he didn't mean it. Exactly the opposite. He wanted them to go crazy, wanted it as badly as he had ever wanted anything, wanted it as the cursed diamond set in this rock n roll crown. That was almost the entire point of this. To make Them crazy for a change.

**Author's Note:**

> www.thenineteen.net


End file.
